Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was one of the preeminent authors of the twentieth century: a poet, novelist, and literary critic who was one of the founders of New Criticism. He earned a master’s degree at the University of California, studied at New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; he taught at Vanderbilt, Louisiana State, the University of Minnesota, and Yale University. Warren was a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He received the Pulitzer Prize three times, for All the King’s Men (1946) and for poetry (1958 and 1979). Three years before his death, he was appointed the first poet laureate of the United States.
Book Reviews
Spring 1941
The Snopes World
The Hamlet by William Faulkner. Random House. $2.50 The Hamlet is William Faulkner’s fourteenth published book of prose fiction. With its opening sentence it proclaims itself a part of that […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1968
Notes on the Poetry of John Crowe Ransom at His Eightieth Birthday
Notes: that is all I am prepared to give, and the fact is strange. Strange, because since the first issue of the Fugitive magazine I have read, I think, every […]
Fiction
Winter 1964
It’s a Long Way from Central Park to Fiddlersburg
In the moment of waking, on the same bed in Fiddlersburg where, twenty years back, he had lain in the dark by Lettice Poindexter, his wife, Brad Tolliver became aware […]
Poetry
Summer 1960
Two Studies in Idealism: A Short Survey of American, and Human, History
For Allan Nevins I. Bear Track Plantation: Shortly After Shiloh Two things a man’s built for, killing and you-know-what. As for you-know-what, I reckon I taken my share, Bed-ease or […]
Poetry
Autumn 1958
Switzerland
“… world-mecca for seekers of pleasure or health …” —Travel Agency Brochure. After lunch take the half-destroyed bodies and put them to bed. For a time a mind’s active […]
Poetry
Autumn 1958
Penthesilea and Achilles: Fatal Interview
Beautiful, bold, shaking the gold glint of sun-foil, Which light is, scurrying and scouring the plain now, she rides To distribute man-death, Greek-death—oh, she is the darling Of war, Troy, […]
Poetry
Winter 1957
Ballad of a Sweet Dream of Peace
(a) And Don’t Forget Your Corset-Cover, Either And why, in God’s name, is that elegant bureau Standing out here in the woods and dark? Because, in God’s name, it would […]
Poetry
Winter 1953
Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices
[Here appears the first half of a long poem. By permission of Random House, Inc., who will publish the entire poem in book form. —The Editors.] An old Indian […]
Fiction
Winter 1950
Portrait of La Grand’ Bosse
(The time is 1826. The place is Kentucky, an island in the swampy country near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi. Jeremiah is a young man who has escaped […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1947
Hemingway
The situations and characters of Hemingway’s world are usually violent. There is the hard-drinking and sexually promiscuous world of The Sun Also Rises; the chaotic and brutal world of war […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1946
A Poem of Pure Imagination: Reconsiderations VI
[Editors’ Note: The present essay is composed of three of the seven sections of an extended study of Coleridge’s RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER. Section 1 analyzes the evidence for […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1946
Melville the Poet
F. O. Matthiessen has undertaken to give in twenty-two pages a cross-section of the rather large body of the poetry of Herman Melville.1 If he had intended to give merely […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1944
The Love and the Separateness in Miss Welty¹
He could understand God’s giving Separateness first and then giving Love to follow and heal in its wonder; but God had reversed this, and given Love first and then Separateness, […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1943
Pure and Impure Poetry
Critics are rarely faithful to their labels and their special strategies. Usually the critic will confess that no one strategy—the psychological, the moralistic, the formalistic, the historical—or combination of strategies, […]
Poetry
Spring 1942
Original Sin: A Short Story
Nodding, its great head rattling like a gourd, And locks like seaweed strung on the stinking stone, The nightmare stumbles past, and you have heard It fumble your door before […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1942
Homage to Oliver Allston
The Opinions of Oliver Allson by Van Wyck Brooks. Dutton. $3.00 The untimely death, two years ago, of the critic Oliver Allston was a real loss to American letters. […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1942
Katherine Anne Porter (Irony with a Center)
The fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, despite the wide-spread critical adulation, has never found the public which its distinction merits. Many of her stories are unsurpassed in modern fiction, and […]
Poetry
Spring 1940
Love’s Parable
As kingdoms after civil broil, Long faction-bit and sore unmanned, Unlaced, unthewed by lawless toil, Will welcome to the cheering strand A prince whose tongue, not understood, Yet frames a […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1939
The Present State of Poetry: A Symposium: In England, in France, in the United States
I. In EnglandBy HERBERT READ To one whose practice in the art was formed a quarter of a century ago, the present state of English poetry cannot be altogether satisfying, […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1939
Arnold vs. The 19th Century
Matthew Arnold. By Lionel Trilling. W. W. Norton. $3.50 This presentation of Matthew Arnold gives us an admirable book, well written, thoughtful, and dispassionate. It is not, properly, a biography, […]
Weekend Reads
Notes on the Poetry of John Crowe Ransom at His Eightieth Birthday
From The Kenyon Review, Summer 1968, Vol. XXX, No. 3 Notes: That is all I am prepared to give, and the fact is strange. Strange, because since the first issue […]