Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren

The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren

Strandberg, Victor H.

Paperback

Literary FiguresLiterary CriticismPoetry Criticism

ISBN10: 0813154588
ISBN13: 9780813154589
Publisher: Univ Pr Of Kentucky
Published: Jul 15 2014
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.99
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Though it has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize, the poetry of Robert Penn Warren still is not widely or well understood. In this study, Victor H. Strandberg redresses this imbalance by providing a comprehensive survey of the poetic canon of this gifted, complex, and much-neglected poet.

Warren writes in the tradition of Western poets concerned with the painful experience of a forced, one-way passage from innocence into the world's stew of time and loss. This passage, Strandberg explains, results for Warren in bifurcation of the self into warring segments: a clean idealistic surface ego, and a polluted undiscovered self in the unconscious. Revelation of the dirty part of human personality is tellingly evoked in many of Warren's major works. As the poet's vision expands, however, these conflicting elements are unified in a mystic osmosis of being whereby the world which once provoked . . . fear and disgust may now be totally loved.

In addition to close analysis both of individual poems and of the poet's overall development, Strandberg reviews critical opinion of Warren's poetry over the last three decades and assesses his place among fellow poets. Both as prophecy and as art, he concludes, Robert Penn Warren's poetry is so significant, versatile, and excellent as to rank him among the finest and most fertile talents of his age.

Also in

Poetry Criticism

View All