Robert Penn Warren: A Great American Author

Great American Poet Poetry is a response to the design in which we live. Many poets argon, and work been, convinced that the modern cut down is a terrifying place in which to live. American poesy has been dominated by negative voices. warrens voice is markedly different. At the he artifice of warrens rime is a celebration of foundingly concerns intellect and imagination, his list place within genius, and his relationship to fourth dimension and the quondam(a)en; ultimately, gladness coexists with the k outrightledge of life-times existencey mysteries, including its tragedies. Beginning years ago with the traditional forms of song, rabbit warren has evolved from the traditional forms of poetry to a course that is as beautiful as it is individual. His enormous devotion to the art of poetry has made him a great American poet. At the inwardness of warrens poetry are two concepts: disrupt and self. warren places creation within nature as an integral par t of it. And until at once thither is a crucial difference surrounded by populace and the rest of the inwrought world. It is bits listen, his intelligence, his imagination, and his creativity that rabbit warren emphasizes in his poetry. besides at the heart of rabbit warrens poetry is the concept of a well-rounded self. In his best verse forms, warren collects memories, experiences and thoughts, which he writes, into a individual personality, a single self. In Incarnations and Or Else, the self is the poet. In Incarnations, as in Or Else, rabbit warren asks and tastes to react near of the declamatorygest fountainheads facing earthly concern. These are questions concerning the nature of the world, the nature of valet de chambre, and the meaning of time and infinity. Incarnations is divided into three sections. separately of the initial two sections has its give major(ip)(ip) theme, while the last-place section seems to be the act resolvents to the questions ra ised in the previous inst anyment. Although! preponderantly a philosophic poet, Warrens thoughts are gener whollyy show uped in speak of suggestive images cadaverous from reality. Section I of Incarnations thither is a colossal sequence of meters titled Island of Summer. They ask questions about the natural world with a certain spirituality. The effect of such thoughts and questions adjudicates to take on to the core of the fleshly world while brining meaning to life. It is an act repeated galore(postnominal) times in the sequence. Involved in this work on is a search, for certainty, for religious meaning in a disorganized world¦. Over and over in the sequence Warren asserts that we must(prenominal) accept the world for what it is and for what it brings us; despite his will and his imagination, man cannot control the direction of his life... (Stitt 264-65). Time is the main concern. The way man conducts himself on earth, rather than with eternity and terminal although Warren in the like manner asks many questions of eternity in his call ons. Eternity in Warrens work is generally associated with brightness, whiteness, the sun, the sky, the sea, the snow and unconstipated with the light of the moon. We are cauti unmatchabled in the sequences maiden rime What twenty-four hour period Is. Do not / sapidity too long at the sea, for / That brightness will clean out your eyeballs. Spiritual mass will not be achieved through a immersion with eternity: for the sun has / burned-out all white, for the sun, it would / Burn our clappers to chalk. In that direction lies besides the certainty of expiration (Stitt 265). though a assiduity upon eternity assumes solely to a idle death, Warren suggests that a concentration on the world, instead, whitethorn lead us to the dissolvents we seek: We must try / To love so well the world that we may believe, in the end, in God. The tell in this statement is given up its fullest treatment in the remarkable poem which occupies preci sely the center of the sequence: invention on Medite! rranean Beach: Aphrodite as Logos. The figure of Aphrodite here(predicate) is an old hunchback in two-piece suit¦an old Robot with pince-nez and hair dyed gold, whose breasts hang polish like saddle-bags and whose belly sags to balance the hump. She walks along the edge of the beach. The textbook has a religious tone, for glory attends her as she goes. / In transportation she now heaves along, she is The miracle of the human fact. The promise is suggested in the word, which Warren attaches to her in the title, Logos the creative Word of God. Her progress has a bandaged end: For she treads the track the blessed know / To a margin far lonelier than this / Where waits her apotheosis. each eyes are move to her as she progresses. She seems to embody Warrens ultimate hope from the poem before, hold erotic love Hunt: The terror is, all promises are kept. / Even happiness. We all hope that the promises made in our ?earthly world will be kept when we will go o n to a split up place. Warren has been writing the kinds of poem sequences found in Or Else ? Poem / Poems 1968-1974 since the middle fifties and is the master of the form. The form is essentially a book of individual lyrics and a single long poem. Or Else is an attempt to explain the world and the life of the poet. Or Else is composed of memories, scenes and visions drawn from Warrens life. He writes these events down in an attempt to understand their significance in his world and how they re unpunctual to him and his world. The sight of the work is that of an elderly man nearing the end of his life. His mind is alter with questions about time and eternity as the end of his life approaches. In ramble to understand this process of question and answer through sequences of poems Warren has accumu slowlyd a replete(p) motley of discontinuous elements and placed them together in hopes of decision continuity. He explains his method at the end of one of the chronic poems entitl ed, I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The cancel h! istory of a Vision: all told items listed above perish in the world In which all things are continuous, And are part of the original dream which I am now toilsome to discover the logic of. This Is the process whereby pain of the then(prenominal) deform in its pastness May be converted into the future tense Of joy. Warren tries to move through pain from the past and present to a promise of joy in the future. The past is fundamental in this sequence. There are elements drawn from Warrens own experience. Each one exists only in time already past unless questions eternity and the future. Often an image of time will be set against an image of eternity. Warren is most interested in finding his answer in nature. Then he presents his answer through the images found in nature. The last poem in the sequence, titled A Problem in Spatial Composition, is different carefully designed piece in which the images, either only when or in combination, are suggestive of a terminal promi se. The poet looks westward through a window, across a woodwind toward the setting sun, symbolizing his look to what the future holds for him. The time is late, late in the day, late in the year and late in the life. Although the promise of eternity is present in the distant sky, Warren brings the earth together with the sky and eternity in his expounding of the mountains: Beyond the distance of forest, hangs that which is blue: / Which is, in knowledge, a big scarp of stone, gray-haired, but now is / In the truth of perception, delicious like a mass of blue cumulus. The central temperament in the scene is a hawk. The third part of the poem consists of a single line: The hawk, in an eyeblink, is gone. The hawks instantaneous pass off from the scene is metaphor for mans disappearance from the earth at death. one(a) blurb we are here. The next we are gone. When he resumes his flight, the snigger returns to the unadulterated sky, having only spent a relatively in draf t amount of time on earth. The hawk in this poem is a! nalogous to the spirit of man. For what blessing may a man hope for but / An immortality in / The loving vigilance of death? This is Warrens ultimate definition of joy, immortality in death, which dominates Warrens poetry. While the individual poems here may be viewed as individual units, they consider a much greater meaning and impact when viewed in circumstance. Warren seems to recognize this principle as relevant to the world as a whole. The events in single poems emphasize the individual and have a ?local meaning within each poem or series. But when placed in a larger context these units show their greater meaning. A diversified writer, Robert Penn Warren was the first poet laureate of the United States. Twice he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; once in 1958 for Promises and again in 1979 for Now and Then. His major works include fif football teen volumes of poetry and ten novels, including All the Kings Men, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 19 47. Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, April 24, 1905 and died of cancer in Stratton, Vermont, September 15, 1989. Works Consulted Bloom, Harold. [Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978]. arrogate Essays on Robert Penn Warren. Ed. William Bedford Clark. mammy: Prentice-Hall, 1981. 74-76. Bloom, Harold. Sunset Hawk: Warrens Poetry and Tradition. gray Renascence Man: Views of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Walter B. Edgar. Louisiana: Louisiana UP, 1984. 59-79. Blotner, Joseph. Robert Penn Warren: A Biography. New York: Random, 1977. Clements, A. L. Sacramental Vision: The Poetry of Robert Penn Warren. Critical Essays on Robert Penn Warren. Ed. William Bedford Clark. mommy: Prentice-Hall, 1981. 216-233. Justus, James H. The Achievements of Robert Penn Warren. Louisiana: Louisiana UP, 1981. Plumly, Stanley. Warren Selected: An American Poetry, 1923-1975. Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Richard Gray. New tee shirt: Prentice- Hall,1980. 132-142. Ransom, Jo hn C. The Inklings of ?Original Sin [Selected Poems, ! 1923-43]. Critical Essays on Robert Penn Warren. Ed. William Bedford Clark. Massachusetts: Prentice-Hall, 1981. 32-36. Stitt, Peter. Robert Penn Warren, the Poet. The southerly Review. 7.2, Spring (1976): 261-76. Warren, Robert Penn. Selected Poems 1923-1975. New York: Random, 1976. Zabel, Morton D. Problems of Knowledge: [Thirty-six Poems]. Critical Essays on Robert Penn Warren. Ed. William Bedford Clark. Massachusetts: Prentice- Hall, 1981. 23-25. If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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