Robert Penn Warren

’s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper

Charles Bohner

WARREN, Robert Penn (24 Apr. 1905-15 Sept. 1989), author and

educator, was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, the son of Robert Franklin Warren, a businessman,

and Anna Ruth Penn, a schoolteacher. Throughout Warren’s childhood on a Kentucky tobacco

farm he heard tales of the Civil War from his grandfathers, both of whom had fought for

the Confederacy. These stories provided a rich source of memories and images that, he

later remarked, nurtured his art. The shaping influence of this southern heritage is

inescapable in any consideration of Warren’s life. Although he left the South for good

when he was thirty-seven years old, he never left it in spirit, and much of his artistic

energy was expended in an effort to reconcile his loyalty to the region with the claims of

modernism.

During the summer of 1920, while waiting to take up an appointment to the U.S. Naval

Academy, Warren lost the sight of one eye when he was accidentally hit by a stone

carelessly thrown by his younger brother Thomas. As crucial as his southern upbringing,

this event determined the direction of his life. Only in late middle age could he bring

himself to discuss its devastating consequences. "I felt," he wrote, "a

kind of shame–shame is not the word–but disqualification for life … some sense of

being maimed " (Watkins, p. 55). In a century that offered young men unparalleled

opportunities for action, he was destined to play the role of observer and commentator.

Forced to abandon a naval career, he enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville,

Tennessee, intending to study engineering.

Warren’s matriculation at Vanderbilt coincided with a gathering of young writers in

Nashville, men brought together by an interest in writing poetry and a nostalgia for the

culture of the agrarian South. Although they seem never to have aspired to be an

intellectual movement, they have been linked ever since by the title of the magazine they

published, The Fugitive. Warren’s college roommate, Allen Tate, and one of his

teachers, John Crowe Ransom, were at the beginning of their distinguished literary

careers. Prominent among the Fugitives, they exerted a strong influence upon the

impressionable Warren and found a place in their magazine for his first efforts at verse.

By the time he graduated from Vanderbilt in 1925, he had determined on a career as a

writer.

Following the example of his Vanderbilt teachers who had supported their literary

ambitions by college teaching, Warren pursued graduate study at the University of

California and Yale University and in 1928 entered Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

In 1930 he returned from England with a degree in English literature, married Emma

Brescia, and took up a position as instructor of English at Southwestern College in

Memphis, Tennessee.

Warren’s career as a university teacher was a model of upward mobility. After a year at

Southwestern, he accepted an offer from his alma mater Vanderbilt and three years later

moved to Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. During the following eight years,

1934-1942, he established a reputation as one of the most influential academics of his

generation.

At Oxford Warren had been drawn to the ideas of a new generation of literary critics.

Reacting to the charge that the study of English literature was a soft option, they wished

to introduce a greater rigor into their classrooms. Insisting on the sanctity of the text

and encouraging an increased awareness of tropes such as irony and paradox, these

"close readers," as they came to be called, found themselves grouped together as

practitioners of a New Criticism. In 1938 Warren and a colleague at Louisiana State

University, Cleanth Brooks, published a textbook, Understanding Poetry, which

codified many of the so-called New Critical ideas into a coherent approach to literary

study. Their book, and its companion volume, Understanding Fiction (1943),

revolutionized the teaching of literature in the universities and spawned a host of

imitators who dominated English departments well into the 1960s.

While a faculty member at Louisiana State University, Warren was also instrumental in

founding the Southem Review. Its title was, as its editors said, an expression of

their "regional and sectional piety." The magazine quickly became one of the

foremost literary and cultural quarterlies in the nation, and eventually it had a list of

contributors and a circulation that belied any charge of provincialism. It did not,

however, survive the urgencies and economies of World War II. After its suspension by the

university administration in 1942, Warren left the South to take up a position at the

University of Minnesota in Minneapolis as director of creative writing.

Warren’s new post called his attention to a concern that had preoc

Внимание, отключите Adblock

Вы посетили наш сайт со включенным блокировщиком рекламы!
Ссылка для скачивания станет доступной сразу после отключения Adblock!

Скачать