Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic born on April 24, 1905, in Guthrie.
Warren was educated at Clarksville High School before pursuing studies at Vanderbilt University, the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, and the University of Oxford. His career as a writer encompassed poetry, fiction, literary criticism, journalism, and children's writing, all produced in English. Among his novels, Night Rider and At Heaven's Gate appeared earlier in his career, while All the King's Men stands as a further example of his fiction. He also authored Who Speaks for the Negro? and wrote Understanding Poetry.
Warren received a wide range of honors across his lifetime. He was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Robert Frost Medal, was named United States Poet Laureate, and was honored with both the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Warren died on September 15, 1989, in Stratton. His output across poetry, fiction, literary criticism, journalism, and children's writing reflects the breadth of his engagement with the English language as a writer.
Quotes by Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren's insights on:
She kept her looks very well and continued, in a rather severe way, to pay attention to her dress. There were moments now when her laugh sounded a little hollow and brittle, the laughter of nerves not of mirth or good spirits. Occasionally in a conversation she seemed to lose track and fall into a self-absorption, to start up overwhelmed by embarrassment and unspoken remorse... She was pushing thirty-five. But she could still be good company.
I didn’t answer right away, and she came across to the writing table, moving quick and nervous, the way she always did, inside of a shapeless shoddy-blue summer suit that she must have got by walking into a secondhand store and shutting her eyes and pointing and saying, “I’ll take that.
I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore.
The wind would come down a thousand miles and pound on the house and the sash would rattle and inside him something would be big and coiling slow and clotting till he would hold his breath and the blood would beat in his head with a hollow sound as though his head were a cave as big as the dark outside. He wouldn’t have any name for what was big inside him. Maybe there isn’t any name.
I ought to have guessed that a person like her – a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us – I ought to have guessed that that kind of person would not be surprised into answering a question she didn’t want to answer.
In America they have to know just what you are – novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I’ve been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It’s not like, say, playing polo and knitting.
I took a card out of my pocket and gave it to him. He looked at the card for a minute, holding it off near arm’s length as though he were afraid it would spit in his eye, then he turned it over and looked at the back side a minute till he was dead sure it was blank.
Only I thought that the Rip Van Winkle story was all wrong. You went to sleep for a long time, and when you woke up nothing whatsoever had changed. No matter how long you slept, it was the same.
The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, speaks a name which belongs to that now nonexistent face but which by some inane and doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger.