Robert Penn Warren Books

This is a very good book, and the writing, particularily in the final chapters, is heartbreaking. The narrative arch is a little disjointed, though.

Warren's Flood or The Cave are much more powerful.

Warren is a master with words. The quality of the writing will keep you glued to the book until the very last page. This complicated tale of love gone bad is truly gripping. This book is no Jackie Collins or Harlequin Romance - it's REALLY REALLY GOOD.

This is a riveting murder mystery/love story that keeps the reader guessing "who done it" even after the last page is read. A stranger (Angelo Passetto), an ex-con, comes to the small Southern town of Parkerton, where he becomes involved with Cassie Spottwood. Also "involved" with Cassie, though more in his imagination than in reality, is Murray Guilfort, her friend and "caretaker" since Cassie's husband Sunderland is bedridden and unable to oversee the farm they operate. One day Sunderland is murdered. Angelo is captured after leaving town, tried, convicted, and executed. But is he the real murderer? Both Cassie and Murray had motivation and means to commit the crime. Warren refuses to show his cards in the book. It's a most compelling story and is more than just a murder mystery: Warren delves deeply into the characters he created, especially Cassie, who is one of his most fascinating characters in all his novels. An intelligent, entertaining book, certainly worth checking out.

There is no author who can so exquisitely capture the elements of small southern towns as well as Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989). Years ago I read "All The Kings Men" and considered it the best book I had ever read. I've always meant to read more of his novels and recently picked up this 1971 "Meet Me in the Green Glen" in a used book store. Well, I started reading it about 7 p.m. last night, and couldn't put it down until it was finished at about midnight. It's rare that a book grabs my attention this way. It's times like this when I am reminded of the pure joy of reading.

This novel is set in the 1950s in rural Tennessee. It's a sad story with an overcast of melancholy throughout. This author is a master of the use of words though and I was constantly reminded that he made his name in literature as a poet. The main character is Cassie Spottwood. She's 42 years old and lives on a run-down farm where she has been nursing her paralyzed husband for the past 12 years. But then a young Italian man comes walking down the road. He's 24-year old Angelo Passeto who has his own problems to escape. He happens to be an ex-convict and needs a place to disappear to. Soon he fixing things and bringing life to the farm. And, naturally, as always in stories like this these two lonely people get involved in a romance. But the story not as simple as that. Eventually there is a murder and a trial. How it all plays out is the crux of the story.

The author uses the perfect details to set the time and the place. I felt I was actually going back in time and living the lives of these people. There's also a lawyer who has plans on running for office, a neighbor who once hoped to marry Cassie and a negro woman and her daughter who was fathered by Cassie's husband. Each character is brought to life through descriptions, through dialogue and through the situations the author sets them in. It's like a great big spider web as everyone in the town has memories and relations with everyone else. There are no real secrets although there is much that is unsaid. Little by little the author drew me into this world. It was not a pleasant world. But it was so well done that I was captivated by his use of words and the seemingly simple but yet complex plot which brings out the nuances of moral choices that constantly have to be made.

This book might not be for everyone, but I loved it and highly recommend it.

Brooks & Warren's text is rightfully a classic for advanced high school or college undergraduate readers. They provide a useful overview of many important topics that one learn for the analysis of poetry. At the same time as they pursue the intellectual approach to poetry, they always keep an eye on appreciating the beauty of poetry.

However, the text is dated and a bit flawed. This represents a somewhat simplified New Critical approach to poetry. Their emphasis on close reading is admirable, but they have a kind of rigid, doctrinaire sense of what poetry "should" be. A professor of mine once called it a kind of blockheaded organicism. Also, their chapter on metrics I find to be poorly thought out; their approach is confusing and a bit thick. Their system of notation is more complex than necessary and not very expressive, and they approach it mostly as a mathematical exercise, not connecting it to analysis of a poem's meaning(s).

Still, all things considered, not bad as a textbook, and it has a wide selection of poems. Not too useful for advanced students of literature.

If there is only one book that teachers should let literature students read, it should be this one. Definitely the Bible of writers (and amateur writers), critics, or those who simply love the written Word. Cleanth Brooks gives as wide a perspective as possible about the different literary movements and the notable poets.It's just a shame that this book is VERY hard to find. A reprint would benefit English literature programs greatly.

For most of my life, I hated poetry. One year, I had a great English teacher who really showed me what poetry was all about and got me interested. This book was just what I needed. I bought it because it had the look of the best prose book around (Writing Prose: Techniques and Purposes, Oxford University Press). It is a great introduction to poetry. It's full of great poems. It's just great. Gosh. You're going to love it. I get excited just thinking about it.

Anyway, it's basically just a big six-hundred page anthology of poems, *with commentary*. And that's key. There are a lot of great poems that you just can't get without a little bit of context.

My adventures in poetry never went further than this book, but I still read it often.

I would just like to add to these good reviews that Understanding Poetry was the text used by Allen Tate in his poetry class at the University of Minnesota in 1966. (You had to sign up early to get into this class because it filled up fast!) Tate taught the New Criticism which emphasized the text as an autotelic artifact, something complete with in itself, written for its own sake, unified in its form and not dependent on its relation to the author's life or intent, history, or anything else. He began each session by reading a single poem from this text, which somehow made it clear just by his reading. Then he explained each line in careful detail. It was a wonderful class, and this book contines this kind of close reading. There is no Anxiety of Influence in the New Criticism.

I find most contemporary poetic practice notable only for its miserly concern for the difficulties attendant upon the small, the domestic, the momentary--huge acreages felled only to tell us that someone built a fence in their backyard once, and their husband helped them and the bindweed grew up around it and that was symbolic of relationships enduring and such. I'm therefore ensanguined by Burt's new collection (definitive enough, I should think, to silence the shrieks of Robert Penn Warren harpies), which teaches us that bindweed can't "hold candle to chokeweed," that fences tend "to grow thick with unfencing menses," and that husbands are meaningful only inasmuch as they "lung persevering into the guts of Cromwell." As a result, this collection--under Burt's sprightly editorship --provides a needed corrective; Warren takes an uncompromising view of the suffering subject splayed upon the rack of history, and the results are cheerful and life-affirming. This book made me realize that there's a reason for everything; I will recommend it to my co-workers.

John Burt has provided an extraordinary service to students, teachers, scholars, and readers of Robert Penn Warren's poetry. Among the 554 poems included in this volume are previously uncollected poems and an unpublished poem, "With or Without Compass?" (in the textual notes)--all neatly organized chronologically in versions that are explained logically and thoroughly in the section on emendations and in the textual notes. The Explanatory Notes section adds glosses to words and references that might otherwise be obscure to a younger audience. Well formatted, well thoughtout, well articulated. "The" volume of Warren's poetry to own, to read, and to re-read.

I will leave it to others more qualified to sing the praises of Warren's poetry, and will merely add some vital information that is inexplicably left out of the books description above: this volume contains every poem published and unpublished that Warren ever wrote with the exception of his book-length poem "Brother to Dragons." It includes his earliest poems from the "Fugative" at Vanderbilt, the long and wonderful "Audubon: A Vision" and all subsequent books of poetry he published. Further, Warren was an constantly revising his poems, and the editor here includes Warren's final revised versions of the poems. Finally, Harold Bloom's introductory essay is a fabulous overview. In short, if you own this book and "Brother to Dragons" then you have ever word of Warren's poetry and you are set for a lifetime of enjoyment. Buy it.

In Brother to Dragons, Robert Penn Warren, former poet laureate and twice winner of the Pulitzer, combined the historical elements of the New Madrid earthquake and the murder of a slave by two of Thomas Jefferson's nephews with his love of poetry. This book has various "voices" relating the brutal events in verse, but history is only a vehicle for exploring the nature of evil and Jefferson's dream of the perfectability of mankind.

This is a marvelous rather experimental volume; it is both novel, play, and poem. It is grim; it is disturbing; it is absolutely wonderful. I highly recommend this work.

This is quite simply the most breathtaking performance by a narrator that I've ever heard. This collection of truly great American short stories, most of which were written in the last 75 years, ranges throughout the country...north, south, east and west. It is just unbelievable to me that any single person could sit down and perform all these stories with an all-encompassing depth of comprehension and a complete mastery of accents...and then on top of that to provide absolutely believable voice characterizations that are totally distinct from the voice of the narrator. This guy Griffin can do a completely convincing child or woman, and then in the next breath he's either back to the narrator voice or that of a male character. I teach literature classes at the high school and junior college level and I have received outstanding results in getting my students to listen to these fine stories without complaint where previously I had to beg and cajole them to read. These recordings have engendered many a lively classroom discussion. The music and sound effects are perfect, never intruding...always in the background when you most appreciate them. You'll never hear Faulkner done better than here. Absolutely fabulous work!

A New Critic to her core, Gordon's discipline, control, and craftsmanship shine through in her short stories. This collection should show anyone why she was such a tremendous influence on Flannery O'Connor. As a master of the short story, Gordon deserves the recognition accorded O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty. I hope someone will reissue Gordon's anthology 'The House of Fiction.'

I am a great fan of the 'Prentice- Hall' critical essays series. And this is one of the better volumes.
Robert Penn Warren one of the great twentieth- century literary figures has gathered together essays by a critical 'Who's Who' of his time :George Marion O'Donnell, Malcolm Cowley, Conrad Aiken, Warren Beck, Claude Edmonde Maguy, Jean Pouillon, Michael Millgate, Lawrence Thompson, Gunter Blocker, Olga Vickery, Lawrence S.Kubie, Alfred Kazin, John L. Longley, Jr. Hyatt Waggoner , Cleanth Brooks, R.W.B. Wilson,Elisabeth Hardwick, Andrew Lylie, V.S. Pritchett, Norman Podhoretz. There are also comments by Andre Malraux , Allen Tate, Graham Greene, F.R. Leavis, Maxwell Geismar, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Clifton Fadiman, Carvel Collins,Pierre Emanuel, Eudora Welty, R.W. Flint, Marcel Ayme, John Crowe Ransom, Albert Camus.
Penn Warren opens with the story of Faulkner's relatively small critical reception at the beginning , and how it was only after the war with the publication of Malcolm Cowley's 'Viking Portable Anthology' that Faulkner's reputation soared. As Penn Warren understands it Faulkner spoke to the more complex and contradictory, the deeper sense of life which emerged after the war, when many battle- hardened veterans returned home. Penn Warren also commends Faulkner for having been the first writer who truly wrote of the South in a way which the people who lived there, knew it. He also makes much of Faulkner's creation of his own mythic world , and how that world was first understood in critical terms by George Marion O'Donnell and later Cowley. Penn Warren also surveys the strong criticism Faulkner was given at times for his having seemingly written with carelessness and neglect- and for his according to critics like Alfred Kazin not having really formulated philosophically a concept of his own work and world.
What is however revealed in reading through the Anthology's essays is how rich Faulkner's writing is in the creation of characters in conflict with themselves and how he did succeed in the words of his famous Nobel speech in writing of the eternal verities- sacrifice,and truth, compassion, and courage-
The theme of conflict between the Sartoris world and its traditional values and that of the Snopes usurpers is outlined in O'Donnell's essay. The great breakthrough in the 'Sound and the Fury' is discussed in a number of essays as is the remarkable Faulkner style with all its vast poetic mythic searching. The whole epic character of Faulkner's world in which the individual novels and stories are understood as parts of something greater than themselves , is also discussed.
Today the general critical opinion is that Faulkner was the great American novelist of the century- and that his work has and will have an enduring place in the canon of world literature.
These essays give insight into his vast work of genius- though since their time of publication the whole world of Faulkner criticism has expanded greatly.

This is the third Robert Penn Warren book that I've read. The first was All The King's Men, followed by At Heaven's Gate. If I were to rank them, ATKM would be first followed by Flood then AHG.

If you're familiar with Robert Penn Warren's writing you will know that it is rich in poetry and deep in meaning. His characters have profound ideas and there is a large scope of understanding within which they express themselves. In this book more than in his other two that I've read, RPW's storyline is driven by his characters and their interactions and less from a sense of action and plot. While I don't clamor for a detective-style fueled-up page ripper, I think giving the story a bit more of an internal engine would have eased the demands on this novel's sometimes fatiguing characters.

The main idea and plot begin with a town that is being flooded to make room for a dam. After reading over breakfast a newspaper article about these plans, a famous filmmaker comes to the little town of Fiddlersburg to make a film. He is joined by one of Fiddlersburg's more famous progeny, and the local reunites with his roots.

The book brings us to understand that this little town breeds a dispossessed clan who cannot make connections with the outside world but are never free from the self-consciousness of their own insularity.

Flood could be one of the best books of our time. I say that it *could* because I found the book to be flawed in some respects. At times it was too opaque and idle in its dreamy meditation of the characters' experience and circumstance. Yet I got to know the importance of Place from which people come and continue to grow, and I felt a tangible loss as this connection was lifted away and the waters rose and the people began to lament. I think this is a great comment on modernity.

RPW has written another long and very good book.

This selection of Warren's wide-ranging verse was published in 1985 and, if I'm not mistaken (and I may well be), won the Pulitzer Prize. The poems themselves, however, go back some six decades.

It is remarkable to read and compare the more recent poems with the earlier ones and to see, at least from these examples, that Warren was an amazingly consistent poet in both theme and technique. Nature seems to be his primary area of concern and man's place in nature's elusive design, but he also writes extensively of Time (almost always capitalized), sex, family, and death. In almost every poem one finds images of stars - which seem to fascinate Warren with their mathematical designs; they link the poems with a kind of leitmotif. Warren draws on his Kentucky boyhood for much of his material, in which he depicts not only the hardscrabble life in general but the more specific drama of his relationships with his mother and father. There are lyric poems and ballads; some poems are easily accesible, others come from more personal sources and remain at least partially obscure even after several readings. The problem that arises with any such comprehensive gathering of poems, especially from a writer so prolific, is the probability of repetition, and Warren himself, good as he is, cannot escape this predicament Still even if meaning remains hidden, one can enjoy Warren's considerable dexterity with language and image. He has a vigorous, firm, muscular grasp of subject and technique.

The poems come from all of Warren's sixteen major collections and opens with the most recent group of poems. His most famous poetic work, the book-length AUDUBAN: A VISION, is included in its entirety.

I've read it over three times and every time I do, I always imagine that if St. Michael the greatest Archangel of God ever decided to be a writer, he would write like Warren!