Robert Penn Warren S Modernist Spirituality

As a man who disclaimed any kind of religious orthodoxy, Robert Penn Warren nonetheless found in Christianity "the deepest and widest metaphor for life." The significance he drew from it was one he expressed strictly in humanistic and natural terms: spiritual renewal and redemption were possible through engagement with literature and participation in the world. In Robert Penn Warren's Modernist Spirituality, Robert Koppelman explores the spiritual or religious dimension to Warren's work in light of his admitted agnosticism. Beginning with an overview of Warren's career as a Fugitive at Vanderbilt and then, later, as a formidable New Critic, Koppelman argues that Warren's regard for the spiritual aesthetic of both literary language and form can be traced to his early study of poetic metaphor. To illustrate Warren's mature vision, Koppelman centers his study on two novels and two poetry collections: All the King's Men, A Place to Come To, Promises: Poems 1954-1956, and Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978. He also examines the critical studies that concentrate on Warren's vision of time, history, and spiritual fulfillment, as well as those essays by Warren that complement his poems and novels in such a way as to elicit the reader's participation in the redemption of their narrators. Robert Penn Warren's Modernist Spirituality renews Warren's commitment to experiencing both literature and life as opportunities to participate in a realm of beauty and vision that is still open to contemporary readers.

James A. Grimshaw, Jr., brings together for the first time more than 350 letters exchanged by two scholars who altered the way literature is taught in this country. The selected letters focus on the development of their five major textbooks--the rationale for selections, the details involved in obtaining permissions and preparing indexes, and the demands of meeting deadlines. More important, these letters reveal their attitudes toward literature, teaching, and scholarship. Providing insight into two of the most influential literary minds of this century, these letters show two men who were deeply involved in research and writing, and who were committed to a life of travel, conversation, and learning. Their zest for life and their love of literature explain, in part, their uncanny ability to persevere and to succeed. Yet their human qualities are also present in the letters, which bring Brooks and Warren to life as rare individuals able to sustain a deep, lifelong friendship. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren will help readers better understand the critical work of Brooks and the creative work of Warren. Students and teachers of American literature will find this book indispensable.

Grimshaw examines the writer's views about the primacy of self-knowledge and explores the painful and arduous path his protagonists must follow to gain such knowledge and the interrelationship of his artistic endeavors, which were woven together by common thematic concerns - history, time, truth, responsibility, love, hope, and endurance.".

America's most eminent man of letters in his later years, and certainly one of the greatest Southern writers, Robert Penn Warren has increasingly come to be known for his poetry. Ghostly Parallels is a close examination of the heart of his poetic corpus-the eight collections published between 1935 and 1976: Thirty-Six Poems; Eleven Poems on the Same Theme; Promises; You, Emperors, and Others; Tale of Time; Incarnations; Or Else; and Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand? Ghostly Parallels shows how Warren constructed collections of poems based on common subjects and contexts and also contends that, while the poems are distinctive, taken together they reveal intricate patterns of theme, imagery, and diction within explicit sequences. Runyon demonstrates that Warren's collections are integrated, well-crafted wholes, and each poem references its predecessor-sometimes in intriguingly self-referential ways. Runyon shows that despite the many changes in diction, tone, and subject that Warren underwent in his long career, his concern for writing his poems in such a way that they could reach out beyond themselves to other poems remained remarkably constant. In the arrangement Warren gave them, his poems form “ghostly parallels”-an expression that appears in “The Return: An Elegy,” where they refer to the railroad tracks that bring the poet home to his dying mother. This return to the mother is a persistent leitmotif in the poems and forms the other major theme of this study: Warren's personal poetic myth, in which such images as golden light and mirror images are signs of the mother's presence as both Danae, mother of Perseus, and Medusa, whom Perseus confronted. Through pursuing sequential patterns as well as echoes and myth, GhostlyParallels brings a wealth of insights to the work of this prolific novelist, critic, and essayist. An important guide for undergraduate and graduate students alike, Ghostly Parallels will also appeal to anyone with an interest in Robert Penn Warren and southern literature.

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.

“Daniel Cross Turner has made a key contribution to the critical study and appreciation of the diverse field of contemporary Southern poetics. “Southern Crossings” crosses a gulf in contemporary poetry criticism while using the idea—or ideas, many and contrary—of “Southernness” to appraise poetries created from the profuse, tangled histories of the region. Turner’s close readings are dynamic, even lyrical. He offers a new understanding of rhythm’s central place in contemporary poetry while considering the work of fifteen poets. Through his focus on varied yet interwoven forms of cultural memory, Turner also shows that memory is not, in fact, passé. The way we remember has as much to say about our present as our past: memory is living, shifting, culturally formed and framed. This is a valuable and important book that entwines new visions of poetic forms with forms of regional remembrance and identity.”—Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Native Guard: Poems Offering new perspectives on a diversity of recent and still-practicing southern poets, from Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey to Betty Adcock, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, and others, this study brilliantly illustrates poetry’s value as a genre well suited to investigating historical conditions and the ways in which they are culturally assimilated and remembered. Daniel Cross Turner sets the stage for his wide-ranging explorations with an introductory discussion of the famous Fugitive poets John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson and their vision of a “constant southerness” that included an emphasis on community and kinship, remembrance of the Civil War and its glorified pathos of defeat, and a distinctively southern (white) voice. Combining poetic theory with memory studies, he then shows how later poets, with their own unique forms of cultural remembrance, have reimagined and critiqued the idealized view of the South offered by the Fugitives. This more recent work reflects not just trauma and nostalgia but makes equally trenchant uses of the past, including historiophoty (the recording of history through visual images) and countermemory (resistant strains of cultural memory that disrupt official historical accounts). As Turner demonstrates, the range of poetries produced within and about the American South from the 1950s to the present helps us to recalibrate theories of collective remembrance on regional, national, and even transnational levels. With its array of new insights on poets of considerable reputation—six of the writers discussed here have won at least one Pulitzer Prize for poetry—Southern Crossings makes a signal contribution to the study of not only modern poetics and literary theory but also of the U.S. South and its place in the larger world. Daniel Cross Turner is an assistant professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. His articles, which focus on regional definition in national and global contexts and on aesthetic forms’ potential to record historical transitions, appear in edited collections as well as journals including Genre, Mosaic, the Southern Literary Journal, the Southern Quarterly, and the Mississippi Quarterly.

Combining both a historical and a critical approach toward the works of major British, American, French, German and Russian poets, this work surveys a century of high poetic achievement

The wandering figure was ever present in Robert Penn Warren's work. Randy Hendricks here explores the centrality of the theme of exile as a way of understanding Warren's artistry, showing that the exile figure is both a key to Warren's relation to much of twentieth-century Southern literature and an index to his growth as an artist. Understanding the exile theme, as Hendricks reveals, is crucial to understanding Warren's regionalism, his thinking on race, and his complex theories of language. This insightful work makes clearer Warren's place in American literature and his importance to the definition of "Southern" and is a valuable resource for anyone seeking to better understand the interplay between regional consciousness, modernity, and the literary imagination.