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Winner of the C. Hugh Holman Award A central figure in twentieth-century American literature, Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) was appointed by the Library of Congress as the first Poet Laureate of the United States in 1985. Although better known for his fiction, especially his novel All the King’s Men, it is mainly his poetry—spanning sixty years, fifteen volumes of verse, and a wide range of styles—that reveals Warren to be one of America’s foremost men of letters. In this indispensable volume, John Burt, Warren’s literary executor, has assembled every poem Warren ever published (with the exception of Brother to Dragons), including the many poems he published in The Fugitive and other magazines, as well as those that appeared in his small press works and broadsides. Burt has also exhaustively collated all of the published versions of Warren’s poems—which, in some cases, appeared as many as six different times with substantive revisions in every line—as well as his typescripts and proofs. And since Warren never seemed to reread any of his books without a pencil in his hand, Burt has referred to Warren’s personal library copies. This comprehensive edition also contains textual notes, lists of emendations, and explanatory notes. Warren was born and raised in Guthrie, Kentucky, where southern agrarian values and a predilection for storytelling were ingrained in him as a young boy. By 1925, when he graduated from Vanderbilt University, he was already the most promising of that exceptional set of poets and intellectuals known as the Fugitives. Warren devoted most of the 1940s and 1950s to writing prose and literary criticism, but from the late 1950s he composed primarily poetry, with each successive volume of verse that he penned demonstrating his rigorous and growing commitment to that genre. The mature visionary power and technical virtuosity of his work in the 1970s and early 1980s emanated from his strongly held belief that “only insofar as the work [of art] establishes and expresses a self can it engage us.” Many of Warren’s later poems, which he deemed “some of my best,” rejoice in the possibilities of old age and the poet’s ability for “continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth, a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process.”

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

In these two essays, one of America's most honored writers fastens on the interrelation of American democracy and poetry and the concept of selfhood vital to each. "I really don't want to make a noise like a pundit," Mr. Warren declares, "What I do want to do is to return us--and myself most of all--to a scrutiny of our own experience of our own world." Indeed, Democracy and Poetry offers one of the most pertinent and strongly personal meditations on our condition to have appeared in recent letters. Our native "poetry," that is, literature and art, in general, is a social document, is "diagnostic," and has often been a corrosive criticism of our democracy, Mr. Warren argues. Persuasively, and movingly, he shows that all of "art" and all that goes into the making of democracy require a free and responsible self. Yet the American experience has been one of the decay of the notion of self. Our astounding success jeopardized what we promised to create--the free man. For a century and a half the conception of the self has been dwindling, separating itself from traditional values, moral identity, and a secure relation with community. Lonely heroes in a bankrupt civilization, then protest, despair, aimlessness, and violence, have marked our literature. The anguish of Robert Penn Warren's own poetic vision of art and democracy is soothed only by his belief that poetry--the making of art can nourish and at least do something toward the rescue of democracy; he shows how art can be- come a healer, can be "therapeutic." In the face of disintegrative forces set loose in a business and technetronic society, it is poetry that affirms the notion of the self. It is a model of the organized self, an emblem of the struggle for the achieving self, and of the self in a community. More and more as our modern technetronic society races toward the abolition of the self, and diverges from a culture created to enhance the notion of selfhood, poetry becomes indispensable. Compelling, resonant, memorable, Democracy and Poetry is a major testament not only to the vitality of poetry, but also to a faith in democracy.

Whitman and Dickinson are the two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century, but who is the third? Some critics say Whittier, others say Poe, and these days an increasing number say Herman Melville. The revaluation of Melville's poetry is due in large part to the influence of this landmark volume, for Melville the poet has never found a more judicious, eloquent, or persuasive champion than Robert Penn Warren.

Robert Penn Warren after Audubon embraces research on developmental psychology, gerontology, and end-of-life studies to offer provocative new readings of Warren's later poems, seeing in them an autobiographical epic focused on the process of aging, the inevitability of death, and the possibility of transcendence. Among the autobiographical elements the author identifies are Warren's loneliness during his later years; his alternating feelings of personal satisfaction and emptiness toward his literary achievements; and, at times, the impotence of memory. The author concludes that the finest of all of Warren's literary efforts can be found in his later works, after Audubon: A Vision.

One of America's great poets writes of his father, lost through death and discovered again through insistent recollection. A death in the family forces a re-sorting and reshaping of all that we can recall of times and people gone from us as we measure our identities by their remembered images. While prowling in the past, Warren is drawn to likenesses between himself and his father, between himself and others of his family. The poet finds that his father too, in his long silent youth, ventured into the writing of poetry, as have so many, but in time put it away for other things. Gradually this elegy for his father becomes Warren's reverie on the many Warrens and Penns who live now only in his memory. We encounter his mother and his mother's mother, his father's Warren line thrown back over three generations, as he draws forth sameness, giving shape and full form and then sharp recognition to family members who were and must yet remain mysteries. Then we see that Warren is delineating the tenuous threads of all our many unsettled and fragmentary American family histories, that he is tracing all our steps from the coast over mountain trails into the dark wilderness to the west. With him, when we stop to consider our loved and lost ones, we realize the delicacy of our accepted relationships. In this autobiographical essay and the accompanying poem sequence that echoes it, "Mortmain," Warren's look into the mystery of the past evokes for us the loss and recovery and wonder that death brings.