The Poetry of Robert Penn Warren

Lesson Plan - Get It!

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Robert Penn Warren, a Southern poet and novelist, became the first official U.S. Poet Laureate in 1986.

This honor might seem surprising because, during Warren's early career, he was best known as a novelist and won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel All The King's Men.

Pulitzer prizes are awarded every year in the U.S. for excellence in literature, poetry, drama, and journalism. However, Warren was a writer who became successful in both genres, and by the end of his career, he was equally well-known for his poetry.

He went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry in 1958 and 1979 and is the only writer to win Pulitzers in both genres.

Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, on April 24, 1905.

He published his first poetry in his late teens. He became associated with a group of Southern poets known as the Fugitives, who celebrated the Southern agrarian tradition in their literature — a style of life that changed irrevocably with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 and the mechanization of farming throughout the early twentieth century. Agrarian refers to farming and cultivating land and crops.

Agrarian literature also extolled the power of God in terms of his ability to both work good and harm through the power of nature, something with which farmers would be familiar because they were dependent upon favorable weather for successful crops.

Warren spent most of his adult life teaching at colleges throughout the United States. By his death in 1989, he was one of the twentieth century's most-acclaimed American poets and novelists.

As you learn this biography on Robert Penn Warren, answer the following questions on a separate sheet of paper.

• What experiences in Warren's childhood would later influence his writing?
• Why was Warren forced to abandon a career in the U.S. Navy?
• What form of literary theory did Warren champion in his academic texts, Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction?
• What was the goal of New Criticism?
• Into what two categories can Warren's ten novels be divided?
• Why did Warren return to writing poetry in the 1950s after a ten-year hiatus from the genre?

After answering the questions, check your work against the provided answers below.

Now that you know more about Warren's life and the influences on his career, move on to the Got It? section to read several of Warren's poems and analyze them with close reading, just like a new critic would do!