The American Vision Of Robert Penn Warren

In 1976—the bicentennial year—Robert Penn Warren told Bill Moyers that he was "in love with America" but his love for the nation was more often than not troubled and angry. Warren once remarked that "any intelligent person is inclined to criticize his country more strongly than he will criticize anything else. And he should It's a way of criticizing himself, too.... Trying to live more intelligently, and more fully." In The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren, a noted Warren scholar traces the evolution of our first poet laureate's distinctive stance toward the American experiment in democracy, showing how Warren sought to balance off the claims of self and society in the New World. This book surveys the full six decades of Warren's career, combining close reading with a historian's eye for social and political context. While pointedly avoiding the reductive pitfalls of the "new historicism," Clark documents the informing role the Great Depression played in shaping Warren's attitudes toward art and politics, and he demonstrates the necessity of regarding Warren's major achievements in fiction and verse as forms of "public speech." Read in this light, Warren's vision offers a set of possibilities for renegotiating America's covenant with its Founders on new and pragmatic terms. Based solidly on the best previous commentary on Warren and his work, Clark's study represents a new approach to its subject and incorporates insights and information garnered from the Warren Papers at Yale. A wide-ranging account of the interplay between an author's imagination and contemporary history, this book should prove of interest to all students of American culture, especially those concerned with the interrelationships of literature, politics, and ideology. Written in a lively and direct style, it will appeal to specialists and general readers alike.

The myth of America--the gap between American ideals and the actualities of American life--is a central and controlling metaphor in the works of Robert Penn Warren. Ranging across Warren's distinguished sixty-five year career, Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination identifies the concerns that stem from Warren's vision of American history as a struggle to restore the lost ideals of the founding fathers and shows how they resonate through his writings. From his 1928 biography of the abolitionist John Brown to the late poems of Altitudes and Extensions, Warren returned again and again to themes related to democracy, regionalism, personal liberties, individual responsibilities, minority relations, and above all the loss of ideals. Ruppersburg initially focuses on Warren's expression of these themes in three major narrative poems: Brother to the Dragons portrays slavery in all its horror and its consequences for Jeffersonian idealism; Audubon: A Vision extols the power of imagination in one man's quest to assert an American identity in the wilderness; and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce regards the victimization of Native Americans and their exclusion from traditional versions of American history as evidence of flaws in the founding vision. In his nonfiction works Segregation and Who Speaks for the Negro? Warren depicted the civil rights movement as a struggle for identity and individualism. Ruppersburg traces the development of Warren's attitudes, arguing that his support of the civil rights movement paradoxically stemmed from agrarianism, which by the 1950s meant something very different to him from the agrarianism of I'll Take My Stand. In addition, Warren hoped that the civil rights movement would restore some of the nation's original revolutionary ardor and idealism. The book closes with an examination of Warren's views on the future of democracy and the individual in a world dominated--and threatened--by science and technology. Looking particularly at The Legacy of the Civil War, Democracy and Poetry, and the poem "New Dawn," Ruppersburg concludes that Warren was skeptical about our prospects for survival. Still, through his advocacy of the arts and the primacy of the individual, Warren affirmed the values that he believed would help Western culture to endure. Robert Penn Warren sought to explore the meaning of the American experience, to validate the promise and the dangers of American ideals, and to urge the nation to take stock of itself and struggle for control of its fate in history. Through this obsessive search for America's identity, Ruppersburg demonstrates, Warren affirmed his own position as one of the most accomplished and significant of modern American writers.

Gedichten geïnspireerd door leven en werk van John James Audubon

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.

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.

Robert Penn Warren is one of the best-known and most consequential Kentucky writers of the twentieth century and the only American writer to have won three Pulitzers in two different genres. All the King's Men, generally considered one of the finest novels ever written on American politics, transcends sensationalism and topicality to stand as art. It was a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize, and became an Academy Award--winning movie. Depicting the rise and fall of a dictatorial southern politician -- modeled on Huey Long of Louisiana -- the timeless story and memorable characters raise questions about the importance of history, moral conflicts in public policy, and idealism in government. In Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: A Reader's Companion, author Jonathan S. Cullick considers the themes of this famous novel within the context of America's current political climate. He addresses the novel's continuing relevance and interviews a cross-section of elected and appointed officials, as well as journalists, in Kentucky to explore how Warren's novel has influenced their work and approach to politics. By focusing on what Warren's novel has to say about power, populism, ethics, and the force of rhetoric, Cullick encourages readers to think about their own identities and responsibilities as American citizens. This volume promises to be not only an indispensable companion to All the King's Men but it also provides context and a new diverse set of perspectives from which to understand this seminal novel.

Volume four of the Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren covers a crucial time of personal and professional rejuvenation in Warren's life. During the fifteen-year period spanned by this correspondence, he completed Brother to Dragons; Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South; and Who Speaks for the Negro? As these titles suggest, these years were marked by Warren's immersion in American history and his maturing interest in race relations. They also saw his return to lyric poetry, after a ten-year hiatus, with the publication of the Pulitzer Prize--winning collection Promises. Along with seeing the completion of some of his most successful work, this period was a time of momentous change in Warren's life, including his move to Yale University; his marriage to his second wife, Eleanor; and the birth of his two children. As a chronicle of Warren's thoughts on his family, his work, his friends, the state of literary studies, and the culture at large, these letters are invaluable.Unlike many writers, Warren rarely drafted his correspondence with future readers and scholars in mind; he typically saved his prepared statements about the human condition and the state of the world for his poetry, fiction, and social commentary. His letters offer a candid and personal glimpse of Warren's relationships as well as his personal views on literature, politics, and social trends. Their recipients include Ralph Ellison, Allen Tate, Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, Eudora Welty, and Louis Rubin, as well as Warren's editors, reviewers, collaborators, and other friends.Providing an unusually vivid and personal account of Warren's rich and fully realized life, these missives are equally revealing of his thoughts on the state of contemporary American culture during this dynamic time in American history.