Selected Poems 1923-1975
New York: Random House, 1976. Third printing [stated]. Hardcover. xvii, [1], 325, [7] pages. DJ worn, torn and soiled. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads To Belle best wishes Robert Penn Warren. Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. Warren's best-known work is All the King's Men. Main character Willie Stark resembles Huey Pierce Long, the radical populist governor of Louisiana. Warren won two Pulitzer Prizes in poetry, in 1958 for Promises: Poems 1954–1956 and in 1979 for Now and Then. Promises also won the annual National Book Award for Poetry. In 1974, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Warren's lecture was entitled "Poetry and Democracy" (published under the title Democracy and Poetry). In 1977, Warren was awarded the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1980, Warren was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Carter. In 1987, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Warren was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Serving as something of a "collected works" compendium, author and poet Robert Penn Warren published these selected poems on 1975, fourteen years before his death. Evident in the selection are the hallmarks of his entire range of poetic output. Derived from a Kirkus review: Robert Penn Warren is a moral realist in his novels and a lyric moralist in his poems. He is fascinated by man's obsessions and imperfections—circumscribed by custom, limited by having to make choices, alternately exalted and dismayed by experience. "The recognition of complicity" as "the beginning of innocence" and "the recognition of necessity" as "the beginning of freedom"—this apposition is the persistent theme throughout his work. The best of the Selected Poems, then, are memorable as examples of moral sensibility, poems whose cultural touchstones reflect philosophy, religion, art, but whose emotional allegiance is with the claims of history and the contradictions of human nature. His panoramic re-creations—the American South, New York, Washington, the old world of the Mediterranean, childhood, marriage, family life—are full of magnanimity, local color, ironic portraiture; they have a genuine thoughtfulness and raw beauty which strikingly project an intelligent and gifted poet's attempt to make sense of the chaos of past and present. The earnestness of Warren's moral concerns is continually apparent. Both in the novels and the poems, during a long and exemplary career, he has blended modernism and romanticism, dreams and responsibilities, in a manner that we can now see is distinctly his own. Condition: Very good / Good.
Keywords: Poetry, Poems, Poets, Verse, Brotherhood, Prayer, Lynching, Chain Saw, Theodore Dreiser, Flaubert, Stargazing, Dauphin, Dream, Paul Valery, Morphine, Emerson, Mount Carmel, Garland, Domitian, Tiberius, Idealism, Sirocco, Lullaby, Ballad, Keepsakes
ISBN: 0394405315
[Book #85169]
Price: $275.00