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.".
Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren, Volume three, provides an indispensable glimpse of Warren the writer and the man, covering a crucial decade in his life. Edited by Randy Hendricks and James A. Perkins, and introduced by William Bedford Clark, this collection of largely previously unpublished letters and newly discovered material documents Warren's time at the University of Minnesota, his writing and publication of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel All the King's Men, his appointment as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, and his divorce from Emma “Cinina” Brescia and subsequent marriage to the writer Eleanor Clark. The period 1943–1952 also saw the publication of “A Poem of Pure Imagination”; World Enough and Time; The Ballad of Billie Potts; At Heaven's Gate; and Selected Poems, 1923–1943. Warren's letters shed new light on those works and on his close relationship with his editors Lambert Davis and Albert Erskine. Included too is correspondence concerning Warren's collaboration with Robert Rossen on the movie production of All the King's Men, which received the Academy Award for best picture in 1949. The list of friends and colleagues with whom Warren communicated reads like a roll call of major twentieth-century literary figures and clearly shows his ever-widening influence on the world of letters. Spanning a remarkable range in both style and tone, the letters disclose Warren's attitudes toward his work as a teacher and his thoughts on the events of World War II, the Korean War, and the political conflicts in postwar Europe. Thoroughly annotated and scrupulously researched, Volume Three captures Warren in an extraordinary phase in his life and career, reaching his maturity and making many commitments at once yet pursuing them all with a seemingly boundless energy.
Crisscrossing the sprawling landscape of Robert Penn Warren, James H. Justus offers us the first comprehensive survey of Warren’s complete canon, including the poetry of 1980. The temptation for everyone who has written on Warren, our most distinguished man of letters still active in American literature, asserts Justus, “is to analyze those themes and moral situations that, because they recur so frequently and obsessively, constitute the massive centrality of an entire corpus.” Justus attempts “to emphasize the ways by which we become aware of such themes and situations, the technical accomplishment of their rendering, which alone justifies our thinking of Warren as a literary artist.” The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren shows how Warren’s work—his fiction, poetry, literary criticism, historical and personal essays, journalism—is shaped largely by the circumstances not only of his birth and early career as a border-state southerner but also oh his training and later career as a transregional artist and intellectual. Dividing his book into four parts, Justus discusses in Part I Warren’s cycle of themes—the most enduring of which is self-knowledge, the very source of Warren’s life work. He devotes Part II to Warren’s poetry: the “mannered archaism” of his early work, the increasing mastery of the tendencies practiced by his fellow Agrarians—the metaphysical mode—and the advantage of technique in his most recent poems. Part III concern’s Warren’s nonfiction prose, with emphasis on Who Speaks for the Negro and I’ll Take My Stand. In Part IV, Justus, analyzes the novels as political and moral statements in Night Rider, At Heaven’s Gate, and All the King’s Men; as romance and history in World Enough and Time, Band of Angels, and Wilderness; and as “art of transparency,” in The Cave, Flood, Meet Me in the Green Glen, and A Place to Come To. Justus demonstrates Warren’s relish for “crowded densities of actuality” as fulfilled in the novelist’s skill in observing detail. “No other writer has made so much out of our cultural artifacts. . . . WPA murals, big houses and shotgun bungalows, letters and broadsides.” Warren continues in a southern literary tradition. The values of the country and small town, those affecting attitudes toward social cohesion and Christian assumptions about the nature of man, are often seen in conflict with the values of a life governed by art and the academy. Justus also places Warren’s work in the larger context of the various streams of American writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He cites in particular Warren’s unresolved relationship to Emerson and compares Warren to Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In examining Warren’s technical accomplishments, Justus proclaims the novelist/poet to be a man whose distinguished career has surpassed those of Edmund Wilson and Allen Tate. Warren calls himself “a little footnote” in the long history of the intellectual tension between transcendentalism and puritanism. Certainly readers of The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren will begin to understand how Warren’s discrete works relate to each other, how from poems to novels to prose—early and late “nothing is lost.” The undertaking by Justus is massive; the accomplishment, monumental.
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At the beginning of 1935, Robert Penn Warren was destined for arguably the most crucial period in his distinguished career. Having escaped the brink of unemployment the previous fall to join fellow Vanderbilt alumnus and Rhodes scholar Cleanth Brooks on the English faculty at Louisiana State University (which was enjoying a boom thanks to the favoritism shown by the Long regime), the young author was poised to establish himself, against the backdrop of the Great Depression and America’s belated entry into World War II, as a compelling new voice, perhaps the most versatile writer of his generation. Continuing where Volume One of the Selected Letters left off, the missives from his Baton Rouge years show Warren exploring and testing the boundaries of his genius on a number of simultaneous fronts. Editing the Southern Review with Brooks was the center of his working life, and it offered him an almost immediate springboard to prominence on both sides of the Atlantic. Warren was determined to establish and maintain the stature of the quarterly even as he systematically nurtured the talent of a younger generation of writers that included Eudora Welty, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, and John Berryman. He attended to his own writing as well and not only emerged as a celebrated poet but also published his first major fiction. During the same period, he and Brooks drew directly upon their classroom challenges to design and launch a series of textbooks that gradually transformed the teaching of poetry and fiction in American colleges and universities. What any number of commentators have called Warren’s “protean” energy is in full evidence in these letters. The range and sheer diversity of his correspondence, whether with old friends, established literary figures, hopeful young writers, his beloved wife Cinina, recalcitrant academic administrators, or sometimes troublesome publishers, reveal an extraordinarily keen mind and heightened imagination operating in concert with optimum efficiency. Scrupulously edited and thoroughly annotated by William Bedford Clark with an eye toward the needs of the lay reader as well as the specialist, Warren’s letters have the immediacy of skillful autobiography.
William Penn's life was, at its core, a search for peace. This study concentrates attention on his greatest effort to secure true peace for all--his undertaking to populate and cultivate the region of North America granted him by the English Crown in March 1681. Penn intended that Pennsylvania should be a haven for seekers of religious freedom and liberty of conscience, especially those who, for the sake of faith and principle, had suffered property forfeiture or bodily imprisonment during the persecutions of the English Civil War, Commonwealth, Protectorate, and Restoration. In commenting on how he had acquired Pennsylvania and what ends it might serve, Penn wrote to William Harrison: For my country, [I eyed] the Lord in the obtaining of it; and more was I drawn inward to look to Him, and to o[we it] to His hand and power, than to any ot[her way]. I have so obtained it and desire that I may not be unworthy of His love, but do that which may answer yet His kind providence and serve His Truth and people; that an example may be set up to the nations. There may be room there, though not here, for such a holy experiment This book traces the historical progress of the foremost themes of the holy experiment from 1681, when Penn wrote the above letter to Harrison. These themes were most fully realized by the 1750s, but the holy experiment continued until 1781, when the experiment was finally laid down. The great themes of the experiment, in addition to the founding principles of peace grounded in religious freedom and liberty of conscience, were public education, preserving friendship with the Native Americans, and abolishing the evil of slavery. By the end of the experiment in 1781, both successes and failures had been realized, successes and failures that continue to underlie the society America has become since those days of its birthing at Philadelphia when the founding fathers gave order to the United States. James Proud is an attorney, now retired, and a priest of the Episcopal Church. Proud is the editor of John Woolman and the A airs of Truth, published by Inner Light Books in 2010.
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