The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren

The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren PDF Author: William Bedford Clark
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813193613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
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 American Vision of Robert Penn Warren

The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren PDF Author: William Bedford Clark
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813193613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination

Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination PDF Author: Hugh Ruppersburg
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820312156
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
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.

Audubon, a Vision

Audubon, a Vision PDF Author: Robert Penn Warren
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description
Gedichten geïnspireerd door leven en werk van John James Audubon

Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren PDF Author: Marshall Walker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren

Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren PDF Author: Robert Penn Warren
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807161896
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 617

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Book Description
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.

The Legacy of the Civil War

The Legacy of the Civil War PDF Author: Robert Penn Warren
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803299273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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Book Description
In this elegant book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer explores the manifold ways in which the Civil War changed the United States forever. He confronts its costs, not only human (six hundred thousand men killed) and economic (beyond reckoning) but social and psychological. He touches on popular misconceptions, including some concerning Abraham Lincoln and the issue of slavery. The war in all its facets “grows in our consciousness,” arousing complex emotions and leaving “a gallery of great human images for our contemplation.”

All the King's Men

All the King's Men PDF Author: Robert Penn Warren
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156012959
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 660

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Book Description
Willie Stark's obsession with political power leads to the ultimate corruption of his gubernatorial administration.

The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren

The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren PDF Author: David Madden
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807155454
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Robert Penn Warren was unique among twentieth-century American writers for having achieved excellence in a broad and assorted range of genres: poems, novels, plays, critical works, historical essays, personal essays, biography, and innovative textbooks. In this collection of essays, critics and poets -- among the finest Warren scholars -- assess Warren's legacy within his various genres and illuminate his centrality to twentieth-century American culture. Although Warren was best known for his novel All the King's Men, the fact that most of these essays focus on his poetry attests to the urgency these poets and scholars feel about the need to call attention to this relatively neglected aspect of his work. Although their approaches and themes are varied, the pieces in The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren are united in their assertion that the writer's true legacy is that he was, in a century of increasing specialization, a myriad-minded Renaissance man.

Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren

Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren PDF Author: Robert Penn Warren
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807139742
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 729

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Book Description
The years 1969 and 1979 bookend a volatile decade in American history. As an articulate witness to the era of the Vietnam War, Watergate, Jimmy Carter, and the national "malaise," Robert Penn Warren produced a phenomenal body of work, securing his place in the canon of American poetry. Volume five of Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren: Backward Glances and New Visions, 1969--1979 includes Warren's letters to friends, family, peers, editors, inquiring scholars, and critics -- recording the details of his personal and professional life and illustrating his pivotal role in twentieth-century American literature. In these turbulent but fruitful years, Warren produced both Audubon: A Vision (1969) and the revised version of Brother to Dragons (1979). In between lay some of Warren's most searching work as poet, novelist, literary critic, and social commentator. During this era Warren's achievements included his highly experimental and complex Or Else -- Poem/Poems (1974) and the Pulitzer Prize--winning Now and Then (1978). Before the end of the 1970s three more novels appeared concluding with his final book of fiction, A Place to Come To. This volume provides insight into Warren's inspiration during a remarkably productive era and will prove an essential resource on his life and work.

Lonelier Than God

Lonelier Than God PDF Author: Randy Hendricks
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820321783
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
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.