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Review by Roger Bishop
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was one of the twentieth century's most eminent American men of letters. He was a distinguished novelist and poet, literary critic, essayist, short story writer, and coeditor of numerous textbooks. He was a founding editor of The Southern Review. He was a popular teacher at Yale and other schools. Also, "Red" Warren, as he was known to his friends, and Cleanth Brooks influenced the teaching of literature to a generation of college students through their advocacy of close textual reading or, as it was popularly known, the New Criticism. Warren hated that term. Not a system, he wrote, "but intelligence, tact, discipline, honesty, sensitivity -- these are the things we have to depend on, after all, to give us what we prize in criticism, the insight."
Warren received many honors including three Pulitzer prizes, one for fiction (All the King's Men, 1946) and two for poetry (Promises, 1957, and Now and Then, 1978), still the only person to win in both categories. He also received the prestigious National Medal for Literature and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, a MacArthur Prize "genius" grant, and was named the country's first Poet Laureate in 1986. Warren was able to achieve as much as he did while overcoming formidable obstacles -- the loss of sight in his left eye and a difficult and painful first marriage.
Joseph Blotner explores Warren's life and work in sensitive and absorbing detail in his outstanding Robert Penn Warren: A Biography. Blotner is a painstaking researcher who is best known for his highly acclaimed Faulkner: A Biography. We follow Warren from his close-knit family upbringing in Guthrie, Kentucky. From these early years Blotner presents several keys to understanding his subject. Warren was an outstanding student but there were also many books at home, and he savored reading. His father at one time aspired to be a poet. His grandfather Penn, with whom he spent much time when he was young, was an exceptional storyteller and greatly influenced young Red. But both of these men whom he loved had in some sense failed to achieve. By contrast, Warren was determined to achieve, to be successful.
At Vanderbilt University he met Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and others interested in poetry. As part of The Fugitives, a private group that met off campus, he delved deeply into poetry, and his first poems were published in their short-lived quarterly. Warren had a remarkable capacity for friendship, and he was in touch with these men all of their lives. For years Tate was "first critic" of his poetry. Warren continued to be an outstanding student at Vanderbilt and later at Berkeley, Yale, and as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. But his passion was for his own writing, especially poetry and novels.
One perceptive critic said that, "Warren's own life, his own story, would become partly at least that of an exile telling stories about his homeland." While this is certainly true, Blotner takes the reader through masterly excursions into individual works and discusses the universal themes -- Time, Death, Nature, History -- that frequently appear. In talking about his work Warren noted: "I am a creature of this world but I am also a yearner. I would call this temperament rather than theology -- I haven't got any gospel. That is, I feel an immanence of meaning in things, but I have no meaning to put there that is interesting or beautiful." He continued to deal with timeless themes, and his late poetry is considered among his best.
Late in life Warren said: "I'm a naturalist. I don't believe in God. But I want to find meaning in life. I refuse to believe it's merely a dreary sequence of events. So I write stories and poetry. My work is my testimony . . . I want to give myself in sacrifice of some sort. To participate in the common body of human life . . . my poetry lets me do that, but that sounds so trite to say."
Blotner shows us how Warren was able to meet the demands of being a prominent pillar of the literary establishment and still find time to write. His very happy second marriage, to the writer Eleanor Clark, and the birth of their two children, were continuing sources of joy for him.
This biography does what any fine book about an author should do. It inspires you to reread or read works by the subject. Another superb book, recently published, that should be of interest to readers of this one is Mark R. Winchell's Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism (University Press of Virginia).
Roger Bishop is Contributing Editor to this publication.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.