Product Description
In this indispensable volume, John Burt has assembled every poem (with the exception of "Brother to Dragons") ever published by Robert Penn Warren, the first Poet Laureate of the United States. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Warren's Poetic Canon: 554
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 Among the 554 poems included in this volume are previously uncollected poems and an unpublished poem, "With or Without Compass?"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.

Truly comprehensive volume
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information that is inexplicably left out of the books description above:this volume contains every poem published and unpublished that Warren ever wrote with the exception of his book-length poem "Brother to Dragons."It includes his earliest poems from the "Fugative" at Vanderbilt, the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.

Warren's poems are a triumph of the human spirit.
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 fencein their backyard once, and their husband helped them and the bindweed grewup around it and that was symbolic of relationships enduring and such. I'mtherefore ensanguined by Burt's new collection (definitive enough, I shouldthink, to silence the shrieks of Robert Penn Warren harpies), which teachesus that bindweed can't "hold candle to chokeweed," that fencestend "to grow thick with unfencing menses," and that husbands aremeaningful only inasmuch as they "lung persevering into the guts ofCromwell."As a result, this collection--under Burt's sprightlyeditorship--provides a needed corrective; Warren takes an uncompromisingview of the suffering subject splayed upon the rack of history, and theresults are cheerful and life-affirming. This book made me realize thatthere's a reason for everything; I will recommend it to my co-workers. ... Read more

Product Description

" In 1979 Robert Penn Warren returned to his native Todd Country, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose United States citizenship had just been restored, ninety years after his death, by a special act of Congress. From that nostalgic journey grew this reflective essay on the tragic career of Jefferson Davis -- ""not a modern man in any sense of the word but a conservative called to manage what was, in one sense, a revolution."" Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back is also a meditation by one of our most respected men of letters on the ironies of American history and the paradoxes of the modern South. Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), born in Guthrie, Kentucky, was one of America's most revered writers, producing fiction, poetry, history, and criticism, much of it focusing on the moral dilemmas of the South. He served as America's first poet laureate. He received the Pulitzer Prize three times, for his novel All the King's Men and for his books of poetry Promises and Now and Then. He is also the author of Portrait of a Father.

Customer Reviews (2)

An Easy Read
Best known as the author of All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren wrote this short (114 pages) book after Confederate President Jefferson Davis had his U.S. citizenship restored in 1979 during the Carter Administration, some nine decades after Davis's death.When this took place, Warren returned home to Todd County, Kentucky for a ceremony honoring Davis's posthumous reinstatement.As it turns out, Jefferson Davis, like Warren, was also a native of Todd County, and this book is Warren's memoir, a reflection on the ironic, sometimes sad life of the only president the Confederacy ever had.This rumination was so engaging I couldn't put it down. I read it in one sitting, captivated by the quality of story-telling and the poignant southern nostalgia it evoked.

Good outline of the life of a great and troubled man
This is a concise - 114 pages - but no less impressive and comprehensive look at Davis's life than some of the longer biographies out there.Warren, like Allen Tate before him, sees Davis as a great man but deeplyflawed.He could quite possibly have won the War Between the States had henot been so rigidly dedicated to the principle of state's rights.He wastoo much the gentleman to do what was necessary.Lincoln, on the otherhand, was a pragmatist, and had no qualms about suspending the constitutionto achieve his means; he thought he was saving the Constitution by defyingit!

A sad tale of greatness thwarted by principle.Warren composedthis essay in honor of his fellow Kentuckian, whose U.S. citizenship hadbeen restored that year - 1979 - by an act of Congress. Warren writes withverve, wit, humor, and insight. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great poems, and models for more poetry
I bought this, because as an unpublished poet, I wanted to read something that was well-written but which was outside of what I've been influenced by for many years: the New York School (Ashbery, O'Hara, et al.) and Wallace Stevens. Plus, Warren brings a sense of history, as in much of his fiction, to his poetry--something I find lacking in much American poetry of the last 75 years. That sense gives it an extra dimension. Wonderful book, and an exemplary writer. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (195)

An A-list summer must-read for the southern-fried lit fans!
This is Southern literature at its peak of perfection. I bought this for my BF a few years back when Sean Penn starred in the film remake of the original classic, as he usualy likes to read the books behind the film. Happily, I got much more than I bargained for. While I disagree about this being a "the best novel about American Politics", it is inarguably one of the best about Southern American life.
There are many kinds of writers: poets, storytellers(novelists), playwrites, and investigative journalists (reporters). Great literary works need to involve a combination of these, I think. Literature is what happens when language is spoken through the eyes of the soul. Literature transcends mere writing. Literature hits a nerve and pulsates throughout your entire being. It's what makes you speechless after you put it down. Such is the power of ATKM.
ATKM's force is driven by RPW's rich characterizations and narrative, seasoned by his deft prosaic hand. Clearly, the man knows how to tell a story. But this is more than that. It's an intimate look through a window in time and place that does what every great novel should do...pick you up and transport you, right into Willie Stark's crisp seersucker suits and spectator oxfords.
That being said, nothing feels more like summer than good ole', southern-fried drama lit, and this book was no exception. RPW's . glorious poetic prose reels you in form the first page. Hell, you can just hear the damned kudzu growing, taste the whiskey, the sweet tea, collards, fried-green tomatoes, feel the scorching, molasses-thick humidity dripping rivulets down your back with every page.
I'm not going towaste space feeding back to you the entire plot and storyline here. You already know that. Just add this one to your summer book list along with some Faulkner, Twain, O'Connor, Welty, Williams, et.al., and enjoy the ride with The Boss, Sugar Boy and Jack!

Good book
I wanted to find out about Huey Long and heard this was a good book to read- it's a novel, though.

OVER-RATED.
ALL THE KING'S MEN is about the corrosive and corrupting forces of politics. When good people get involved in politics they generally become bad people. Its the story of a country chicken-kicker named Willie Stark who gets into politics to do good then becomes the king of the corrupt after he's elected governor.

My problems with this book are the backstories and the 'and then a miracle happened' moments. There is too much backstory, and much of it is irrelevant; Stark's election to the governor spot is a miracle that fell out of the sky; Stark was a chump and then he was governor. Getting from chump to governor woulda been interesting reading.

At the beginning the book is absorbing, later it becomes tedious, and towards the end I kept asking myself, ARE WE THERE YET? ARE WE THERE YET? ARE WE THERE YET?

Excellent book - just don't get the Polk "Willie Talos" edition
As with many of the "classics" it seems like there are a bunch of editions of "All the King's Men" floating around. I recommend that you get the originally published Robert Penn Warren edition, in which the main character is "Willie Stark", and not this "Willie Talos" edition.In my opinion, the tale of Willie Stark is one of the best books in 20th century literature, from a pure story-craft standpoint, and not to be messed with.

I'll admit I first came upon this book as part of the "summer reading list" for a school English class.There were some truly enjoyable books on that list as well as some that just seemed incomprehensible ("The Sound and the Fury", for example) and others where I had very little idea of what the author was getting at."All the King's Men" was just a knock-your-socks-off novel.It has interesting characters, a (mostly) believable context, and enough suspense that you're not sure just what might happen next.The main characters in the book are Willie Stark, a powerful and corrupt state politician in the American pre-war South, and Jack Burden, a journalist from a wealthy background who essentially works for Willie.As the story begins, Willie hires Jack to find some dirt on a political rival that Willie wants out of the way.Jack's efforts to do so, and Willie's own hubris, eventually impact the lives of Jack and several people he loves, including the only consistent father figure he ever knew (an elderly judge) and Jack's teenage love.Jack tells the story of his own life intertwined with Willie's life, leading up to the climactic events where Willie finally falls from grace.In doing so, Jack shows how both he and Willie started out innocent but were gradually corrupted by the machinations of a system outside their control.

Although Willie's tactics seem brutal, they may also be seen as a way of exerting control over a system that would otherwise crush him and other common people. An outwardly even less powerful person, Willie's secretary Sadie Burke, who is herself from a poor background and is scarred by pock marks, turns out to be the one who pulls the strings that both bring Willie to power and knock him back down.Sadie is one of the most interesting female characters in 20th-century literature (much more so than her foil, the quiet, retiring, beautiful Southern belle Anne Stanton, who is barely developed) and is as much of a politician as any of the men.

This is a book that you can just enjoy reading from a pure standpoint of reading a political or historical novel, even if you don't want to get too deeply into analyzing it or understanding all the allusions and English-majory stuff.It's just a darn good book, period.I have seen the older movie adaptation but it is hard to do this book justice in the movie format since there's simply too much going on in it to fit comfortable into two hours.

not the novel
Beware, the "All the King's Men" version with ISBN-10: 082220018X is not the novel. It is the play, a short pamphlet.
Not only does Amazon not state this, but they put the reviews for the novel in the review section of this play.
I had to give it some stars, so I gave it 3, it doesn't mean anything, except for the fact that Amazon should fix this problem. ... Read more

Product Description

In his sixth novel, The Cave (1959), Robert Penn Warren tells the story of a young man trapped in a cave in fictional Johntown, Tennessee. His predicament becomes the center of national attention as television cameras, promoters, and newscasters converge on the small town to exploit the rescue attempts and the thousands of spectators gathered at the mouth of the cave.

Customer Reviews (3)

A Character Study
This is a work to be carefully and reflectively read.The story itself is a simple one of a failed rescue attempt from a cavern.The various characters' lives which are written as sidelights to the main story are of what is of interest in the story.Unfortunately, to this reader at any rate, these rich characterazations are all too abruptly abandoned.Each one of these lost characters would be worthy of a novel in themselves.I feel as though the character Dorthy, for an example, is a well-developed character study but eventually is just left hanging.Worse yet, the main protagonist, Isaac, simply runs away.I found this to be most distressing.

Complex Characters, Complex Book, Complex Ideas
Here's a book that is becoming more and more rare... a book about complex people with complex motives.Warren's poetic novel is wonderful to read just for the phrasing at times, but the characters, their history, their thoughts and actions, and their interactions are what really brings this to the top of my short list.It's a book for a book group.So many ideas so close to the surface, without being absolutely thrown in your face.Without giving away the end, I can say that you see much of it coming, but you don't care.You want to read every word to see what Warren has to say about the connections and lack of connections between people.

I can't believe this is out of print!
I found this book in a used bookstore and just opened it up and started reading. Something about it got me hooked, and I just keep going. The novel is constructed brilliantly, with Warren providing large backgrounds for all of his charecters in the first 150 or so pages, and then the "experiences" of the different individuals caving in on one another. The end of the novel contains some of the most powerful dialogues scenes I have ever read. I loved this book. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

Good writing is always in style
As the centennial of the Civil War approached Life magazine asked Robert Penn Warren to write an essay on the impact the war had on America.Warren, a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and numerous other prizes accepted.This small book is the essay he wrote in 1961.While Warren never considered himself a historian, he had a lifelong love of history and published a biography on John Brown.His grandfather, who fought for the South while believing in Union, told him about the Civil War and instilled in him a love of history.

This essay is as fresh and new today as it was in 1961.Warren's thoughts on the war, what he calls "The Great Alibi" and the "Treasury of Virtue" are still accurate.This is one of the great essays on the American Civil War, the impact on American history and how it affects us today.The style of writing is interesting, intelligent and very easy to read.You will quickly be caught up in the logic even as you identify current positions and come to understand their historic importance.

Civil War Established America as a Country.
Robert Penn Warren, a noted Southern writer, is certain that our Civil War shaped modern America, the social institutions which had to take care of the freed slaves, domestic policies, and foreign interests."The Civil War is our only 'felt' history -- history lived in the national imagination and not just on paper. This is not to say that the War is always, and by all men, felt in the same way.Quite the contrary.But this fact is an index to the very complexity, depth, and fundamental significance of the event.It is an overwhelming and vital image of human, and national, experience."

It taking place so long ago and ended so disastrously with the death of Abraham Lincoln, I really don't believe it caused our failing economy, philosophy, and psychology.Far too many wars, most on foreign lands, have taken place since then to put all the blame on the ressurection of the slaves."There is no facet of our lives today that does not owe its present character in some measure to the Civil War."

The Confederate Commander in East Tennessee was General James Longstreet.The siege of Knoxville and Battle of Fort Sanders was disastrous for this area.Bridge burners to stop the railroad took place across East Tennessee.The campaign at Strawberry Plains was led by Colonel William P. Sanders, for whom the Fort on the UT campus was named.Bulls Gap, birthplace of Archie Campbell (HeeHaw fame) was pivotal for the northeast, as was Lick Creek Bridge and Blue Springs.

In Middle Tennessee, commandered by Braxton Bragg and John Bell Hood, Nathan Bedford Forrest reigned in Columbia, having been born a short distance away in Chapel Hill; Columbia is the birthplace of a U. S. President, James Polk,Thompson's Station and Fort Donelson on either end of Nashville had important confrontations.In Pulaski, Sam Davis was hanged as a Confederate spy; there is a statue on the Square and on Capitol Hill in Nashville.His home at Smyrna is near Murfreesboro.

West Tennessee was under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest, whom Sherman called, "that devil Forrest."There is a statue of him in Forrest Square on Union Avenue in Memphis.He started his campaign in Clifton on the Tennessee River where the federal ironcladheld sway, near Jackson, TN.At Shiloh, one of the nations's oldest and most pristine battlefield parks, General Albert Sidney Johnston led the Southern side and died (buried there 25 miles Northeast of Corinth, Mississippi, near Savannah, Tennessee.The Sons of Confederate Veterans have established a memorial at Salem Cemetery near Jackson and a small park at Davis Bridge, near Bolivar.

Robert Penn Warren was a Phodes Scholar at Oxford University in London and taught at Yale University, as did Richard Marius.He wrote JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF A MARTYR, THE CAVE, WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME, BAND OF ANGELS (made into a movie), ALL THE KINGS'S MEN which won the Pulitzer prize and made into an Academy award winning movie about Huey Long.He also wrote PROMISES (poetry, which won the Edna St. Vincent Millay Award of Poetry Society of America), SELECTED ESSAYS, TEXTBOOKS: UNDERSTANDING POETRY and UNDERSTANDING FICTION.He was truly as much a part of history as the Civil War of which he writes his meditation on the Centennial in this book.

Outstanding
Interesting little book, this.Costs next-to nothing and takes almost no time to read.But there's more here than most of the other spurious profundity published these days.

Warren, a Kentuckian whose grandfather fought for the Confederacy during that war, looks at the effects of the waron both North and South.Warren is harsh on the hypocrisy of the North andits "Treasury of Virtue" as he calls it.But he is no LostCauser; he is equally harsh with the South, with its "GreatAlibi."And Warren is scathing with those racists who believed(andstill believe)themselves to be the legatees of Jefferson Davis or Robert E.Lee.An essential book.

A miniature classic of historical interpretation
The noted poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote several brilliant book-length essays on various subjects, including JEFFERSON DAVIS GETS HIS CITIZENSHIP BACK (which originally appeared in THE NEW YORKER) and INTEGRATION, but none better than this miniature classic of historical interpretation.In 1961, when LIFE magazine asked him for his thoughts on the centennial of the Civil War, he wrote this superb, thoughtful essay (originally subtitled "A Meditation on the Centennial").In an extraordinarily compressed discussion, Warren notes a dizzying variety of effects that the war and the policies it brought in its wake had on American society.His two most important observations have to do with the ways that the North and the South used the war as alibis.For the victorious North, the war was a "treasury of virtue" that excused generations of corruption, short-sighted public policy, and neglect of national interests; after all, we won the war and freed the slaves.For the defeated South, the war was "the great alibi" that excused every failure to grapple with a region's pressing social and economic problems.Warren never wrote better than in these eloquent pages; this book should be required reading for anyone interested in the Civil War in particular or American history in general.Its reappearance, with a fine introduction by Howard Jones (author of MUTINY ON THE AMISTAD and other excellent histories of the Civil War era), is cause for celebration. -- Richard B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School, and Daniel M. Lyons Visiting Professor in American History, Brooklyn College/CUNY (1997-1998) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An Elegy For Fiddlersburg
I hesitate to call this work a novel.In fact, Robert Penn Warren hesitates to call it a novel.He christens it a Romance, correctly I think. It is far more apt a term.The book for which poet RPW is most famous is, of course, All The King's Men, which is indeed a tour de force of at least three novels woven seamlessly into one.His most powerful work, though, I still think to be World Enough And Time: An almost inhuman book of fulgurous brilliance lighting a desolate nightscape of the human soul.But this book as I - and Warren - say, is a Romance.

More - it is a particular type of Romance - the Elegy.It is sad and sweet with deep, long chords drawn out over hundreds of pages for the dying town of Fiddlersburg, the central character of Brad Tolliver and a host of other characters, living and dead, connected by what one of them calls a "mystic osmosis."

As for the writing, this same character, Blanding Cottshill, says, a propos thereof at one point in this elegy: "And without irony - I mean an awareness of that doubleness of life that lies far below flowers of rhetoric or pirouettes of mind - no real conversation, conversation of inner resonance, is possible."The writing here is full of the awareness of this human ambiguity and doubleness.

It is also, however, replete with flowers of rhetoric and pirouettes of mind, as befits an elegy.It's a lovely, lush prose poem for all humanity.And, as with all RPW's works, leads the reader into a mindset of deep contemplation.

To say that it falls short of RPW's best work - as it does - is not to disparage it by any means.

A Marathon of Poetry and Humanity
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. ... Read more

Product Description
First published in 1955, Band of Angels is one of the most searing and vivid fictional accounts of the Civil War era ever written. An acclaimed novelist, poet, critic and teacher, and author of dozens of books, Robert Penn Warren was the only writer ever to receive Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Not at all like the movie...
When this book was first made into a movie, it was my favorite.I loved the props in the movie and was wondering how they were described in the book.To be very honest, the movie is very little like the book.So, while this book was interesting, it wasn't really worth my time to read.

A poet writes a novel
Robert Penn Warren is a poet first, a novelist second. The quality of writing in this dark pre and post civil ware story is worth the time all by itself. The plot is just the icing on the cake.

This is a story about a young woman who finds a dark truth about her heritage after her father dies and she returns the plantation where she was reared. There are no facile answers to hard questions of race and property, "well loved" slaves and freedmen.

If Gone With the Wind is a 1930 Southerner's view of what the Antebellum south was like, then Band of Angels is a 1950 Southerner's view of what it would have been like to be black during and after the civil war.

This book should be required reading, even in the 21st century.

Good, solid read
I'm a fan of RPW so I'll admit my review will be biased in the regard.This story, the tale of a young girl who learns she is half-black only upon the death of her father's funeral is at times a heartwrenching tale and, at others, quite irritating.The plot itself is an excellent one - this is not the world of mainstream fiction where plots are used over and over again.However, as a character Manty falls a bit short.You want the growth for her that a heroine (even a broken one) is expected to have and through most of the book you expect this to happen.She does whine (as another reviewer mentioned) and it does get annoying in places.However, I was able to overlook this for the great scenery, descriptions and view of the south that RPW was able to provide.It's a completely different view than you would find in Gone with the Wind and if you enjoy that book, I'd suggest you read this to help give yourself a more balanced, if not realistic, impression of the old south.

Just pretty good
The reason I give it three stars is that after his great prize
winning novel, we expect insight, not whimpering
and a young girl in a tragic case being "sold south".
For the novel's time it was a little daring
and the historical content seem fine.
My reasoning is that he just doesn't seem to understand the psychology of women very well. I don't think it is up to the potential
that Robert Penn Warren had shown before. It seems an effort to
get into the bestseller category instead
of being true literature.

Freedom and identity

Set from just prior to the Civil War up to about 1888, this novel explores the concepts of freedom and self-identity. Told in the first person by the main character, Amantha Starr is the daughter of a rich Kentucky planter and one of his slaves. She goes to Cincinnati with her father where under the tutelage of Miss Idell (one of Warren's best character creations in the novel) she is readied for Oberlin College. At Oberlin she meets Seth Parton and learns about abolitionism from him, which she immediately uses against her father to get him to free his slaves. It doesn't work, but it makes her feel powerful for the first time, which Warren makes ironic since after her father dies Amantha learns that he never manumitted her: she is sold into slavery and sent to New Orleans.

Now the property of Hamish Bond, she learns to "protect" herself with self-pity. After New Orleans falls to the Federals, she marries the Union officer Tobias Sears. Sears is a fiery promoter of freedom for the slaves and black rights, but the wealth to be made in Reconstruction contaminates him; he begins drinking heavily and becomes an utter failure, to his cause and to himself. It's with this realization about Sears that Amantha, who has always relied on the men around her (her father, Parton, Bond, Sears) to define and control her, throws off the cloak of self-pity and stands up for herself for the first time.

Warren's message is that if Amantha was looking to others to set her free, she was wasting her time: her freedom can only come from within herself. It's an important idea, worth repeated reminding. Dense with period details, and sometimes melodramatic, the novel is nevertheless compelling. Based on a true story and made into a movie starring Clark Gable as Bond and Yvonne De Carlo as Amantha.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Out of a desire to be well read
As a music major during the mid-to-late 50s, I missed out on the great literature classes offered at Hendrix College, in Conway, AR.--except for Modern Novel (Dr. Walter Moffett). After retiring in 1994,I decided to begin collecting all the classics I could lay hands on in flea markets (a great source), Goodwills, and library book sales. I picked up World Enough and Time in 2005 in Eureka Springs AR merely because of Robert Penn Warren's reputation--three Pulitzers and a stint as US Poet Laureate.
I began without reading any online reviews--only the flyleaf. It had been so long since I read All the King's Men I had no recollection of it. I found this volume logy, dense and--as other reviewers have said--verbose. I had to read rapidly to keep up with the undercurrents of "idea," "truth," "lie," etc. About halfway through, after underlining several sentences that could just as well relate to my own late father, I read the reviews.
As one comment says, someone (reviewer) gave away two of the big events. Thereafter, I kept looking for them. I didn't realize until the "epilogue"--I thought the saving of Jeremiah would be the end--who was the villain. And the "surprise" came four pages from the end. I pursued the reading--hours' worth--until at midnight one night--I finished.
I'll keep the old, stained, well-used copy for my descendants, but I will not recommend it to anyone--unless it's my social worker brother in California.
At least I consider myself "more" well read--especially for one who desires to publish a novel. But never will I write in Warren's style--never.

A disappointing book
Back in 1958 I read All the King's Men and it was the best book I read that year.Recently I read a history of Kentucky and was interested in the Relief and anti-Relief factions which were big things in Kentucky in about 1820 and thereafter, and in the Old-Court-New Court dispute.I learned that this novel was laid in that time so decided to read it.The part of the novel which relates Jeremiah Beaumont's expedition to kill Colonel Fort and the trial are interest-holding, but the many pages preceding that part, and the many pages after that part I found quite boring and if I were a quitter I would have ceased reading the book.Much of the philosophizing which Jeremiah relates endlessly was a real drag.I do not know how much of the novel is based on fact, but I know that much of it is not.Warren states some charachters were elected to the Senate but they were not, altho some historical figures are referred to.I am always disturbed by fiction which says things which clearly are not true.If you enjoyed All the King's Men, I would say that you will not be admiratory of this work.I am not.

To Name the Idea as All
I'll begin by praising the plot. This is a very well told story. Robert Penn Warren excites the reader's interest early in the text, and I never lost interest in the characters he creates, nor in their fates.

The prose style is lovely and intoxicating. Yet the author's is a very ornate, southern style. It is fair, I think, to say that Robert Penn Warren's style is diametrically opposed to the stripped down simplicity of Hemingway's early prose. Where Hemingway way is terse, Warren is verbose, where the one carefully removes adjectives, the other adorns his prose with a thicket of dense verbiage. If you think I exaggerate the importance of this issue, I offer the following quote as a sample of Robert Penn Warren's style:

"In any case, he had been spewed up out of the swamps and jungles of Louisiana, or out of some fetid alley of New Orleans - out of that dark and savage swill of bloods - a sort of monstrous bubble that rose to the surface of the pot, or a sort of great brute of the depth that swagged up from the blind, primal mud to reach the light and wallow in the stagnant flood, festooned with algae and the bright slime, with his scaled, armored, horny back just awash, like a log."

What are we to make of sentence like this? How does one approach an author capable of such a passionate, ornate prose? Either the reader closes the book, insisting that he will not read even one word more, or else he must give himself completely to this author, relinquishing his own will, setting himself afloat upon a current that will drag him inexorably into the heart of human sorrow and loft him to the heights of human imagination. There is no middle ground here. The reader cannot sit back and dispassionately turn the pages of a book whose every paragraph is aflame with passion and intellect.

Something must be said of the book's themes. The other reviewers have given a taste of Robert Penn Warren's interests. I would add only that I think his main theme is the danger of idealism, of falling in love with an idea and clinging to it with an unrelenting egoism. Warren writes at one point: "No, that crime for which I seek expiation is never lost. It is always there. It is unpardonable. It is the crime of self, the crime of life. The crime is I.... For ... it is the first and last temptation, to name the idea as all, which I did, and in that error was my arrogance, and the beginning of my undoing...."

Though I find it unlikely that Robert Penn Warren was interested in eastern philosophy, I nevertheless find it interesting that the sentiments expressed in the previous paragraph are central to certain forms of Buddhism. Those philosophies reject the very idea of the existence of a self, and they warn constantly about the danger of being caught up in ideas, in "views."

Well, regardless of the idiosyncratic interpretations and interests that I bring to the book, I hope that others take up this wonderful text and spend a few enjoyable evenings borne along on its current. As others point out, this is a dark book, but it is also a great story, well told, and a fierce, fiery example of what a passionate and deeply engaged writer can do with the English language. The fact that no one in this day writes in this style, and with this deep sense of commitment, makes me wonder about what we have lost in the last sixty years. Certainly it is refreshing to take up a text that is so passionate, so engaged, and to relish the experience of reading a great story told in a powerful, intoxicating style.

The World's Lie
This book is difficult, nay, impossible to review in the normal fashion.No adjectives come to mind but deep and dark, dark beyond your heart's wildest imaginings.It is if some daemon or muse from the underworld took hold of Robert Penn Warren's pen as soon as he set it to paper here.Nothing makes sense or lends itself to a rational review.The Andrew Marvell poem whence the book takes its title, with its carpe diem theme, is not apt at all to the book; nor are the Spenserian stanzas that preface the book applicable to it.It's as if Penn Warren had in mind another book altogether before he embarked upon its creation.It's as if Warren, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet, was seized by his dark muse and spirited away whilst the book took form.The poem that should form part of title or preface is Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Lie," but without that poem's consolation of the "soul."

The plot concerns, ostensibly at any rate, one Jeremiah Beaumont's coming of age in early 19th Century Kentucky and how he discovers, through trial (literally and figuratively) and tribulation that - as Raleigh sonorously intones it - the world is a lie.

The experience of reading the book was extremely visceral for me, as it will be for any poetically attuned reader.These lines from the book itself best describe its effect:

"Every gully and ditch was a bleeding wound, and every solid object, tree or stone or house, seemed to be losing itself in the vast irremediable deliquescence.Human strength and human meaning seemed to flow away, too, to bleed away with the dissolving world."

This deliquescence of everything of worth in the world is seamlessly interlarded - throughout the book - by Warren's dark muse, which is so deft as to quickly turn a description of a seemingly quiet domestic life into nightmare:

"Jeremiah says that that time made him think of what old age must be like when two people have outlived all their love and hate for each other, when they know each other's faults so well that the faults no longer have meaning, and the resentments are no more than the accustomed pain of a rheumatic joint, part of the nature of things, when they can live in peace because neither is more than a ghost to the other."

There is much ado about the law and justice herein.Jeremiah is himself a lawyer.When reading through these parts, I found myself thinking at one point that this would make good reading for anyone considering the law, only to realise quickly that it would turn any sensitive reader away from the law more powerfully than anything I have ever read.There is, in the end, no law, no justice, absolutely nothing of that nature that obtains here though Jeremiah (with the reader in tow) seeks it desperately. There remains only one truth Jeremiah discovers as he lies face down in the dark, awaiting his execution:

"It was dark, and in that darkness you could lie and not know the perimeter and boundary of your being if you did not lay finger to your face, for the darkness entered you and you dissolved into the darkness and were absorbed like a body thrown into the sea to sink forever and flow away from itself into the profundities of no intrusive light......There was always that truth."

Yes - one murmurs, much later, turning the last page - there is always that truth.

It becomes, upon finishing the novel, quite obvious why the literary world has turned a blind eye to this dark masterpiece in American fiction.It is simply too powerful.

Disillusionment in early Kentucky
This novel, one of Warren's best, is set in Kentucky in 1825, and is concerned with power and redemption - and also what may or may not be the truth. Jeremiah Beaumont, an idealisticlawyer and promising politician, becomes disillusioned with his benefactor (Cassius Fort) when he learns that Fort has seduced a young girl (Rachel Jordan). Beaumont "rescues" Rachel and proposes marriage to her; she accepts only if he promises to kill Fort. But Fort refuses to fight Beaumont, and in an excellent piece of character development, Warren shows the betrayal and weakness this refusal instills in Beaumont. He and Rachel marry anyway, but when Beaumont reads a political handbill revealing the affair between Rachel and Fort, he thinks Fort wrote it to end his political ambitions. Now he kills Fort and is arrested. He escapes from jail and learns that another character, Wilkie Barron, had written the handbill, not Fort. Rachel commits suicide and Beaumont is murdered while trying to get the truth told.

Warren, as part of his narrative method, uses a number of letters and diaries and a manuscript written by Beaumont found amongst his papers as a means of conveying the story. But, of course, these represent only Beaumont's side of the story and may not be "the truth" at all. Warren's characters are strongly drawn; the ambitious and evil manipulator, Wilkie Barron, is particularly good. The suicide of Rachel is a bit melodramatic, though it's tempered somewhat by the unhappiness and trials she faces living with Beaumont. Warren based the novel on a true story. A highly regarded work, it's among the best of his novels. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The Way It Was.
The author of ALL THE KING'S MEN wrote during a time when one could speak his mind and beliefs in an upfront way with dignity without critical interrogation as to his politics, religion, etc. He was not like Huey Long.Robert Penn Warren is a disguished Southern writer, born in Guthrie, Kentucky. Since he graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, we like to claim him as one of us. The first book of his I read was A PLACE TO COME TO. He went on to get degrees from University of California, Yale, and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1930.

He was a most prolific writer, some of the main ones I enjoyed were THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR, JEFFERSON DAVIS GETS HIS CITIZENSHIP BACK, JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF A MARTYR, BAND OF ANGELS (a movie was made of this), ALL THE KING'S MEN (won Pulitizer Prize for Fiction) and EYES, ETC.: A MEMOIR. He wrote a famous play called ALL THE KING'S MEN and many volumes of poems, most especially AUDUBON: A VISION, CHIEF JOSEPH OF THE NEZ PERCE, PROMISES (1957, which won the Pulitizer Prize for Poetry) and NOW AND THEN (his third Pulitizer Prize).

In 1944-45, he was the second occupant of the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. He received numerous other awards for his writing of all sorts, as he continued to be a professor of English. He was one of a special group of Vanderbilt-educated writers, including some well known personages as prolific as he and as well-loved. He did an in-depth study of Melville. He was a controversial figure in his old age, but always the true blue Southern gentleman.

Night Rider
Percy Munn, a young lawyer and tobacco farmer in Kentucky, becomes a powerful member of The Association - a group of farmers who band together in an effort to break the economic monopoly of the big tobacco companies. It's not an easy fight, and soon The Association is acting like the KKK, coercing farmers into doing their bidding, resorting to violence if necessary. Munn's morals disappear. Warren explores this dilemma of a good man doing bad things for a good cause and the effect it has on his life pretty well. It's a powerful work in spots, especially in Warren's use of dialogue, but finally the story, and the book itself, seems too long and drawn out. A decent first novel, but Warren would do better work later on.

Flawed first novel, but hints of the better work to come...
Penn Warren ended up with a fine reputation, largely based on "All the King's Men" andpoetry andliterary criticism and his standing as a "modern" Southerner in the mid-20th century who could explain some of the past sins and virtues of his ancestors and neighbors. This first novel displays promise, but is not a compelling read page-by-page. It improves with each chapter after getting off to a slow start. For my taste, there is excessive Kentucky backwoods dialogue, some uninteresting digressions, and some failure to develop the major characters in ways that make one care deeply about their fates. Percy, the lawyer and main figure, idealistically but with some vanity, jumps into a tobacco growers union which plans to fight the big corporate buyers in order to get a fairer price for the crop. However, little-by-little, the association members begin to become coercive, and then to terrorize, those who won't join. A moral cause has become an immoral enterprise by the end of the book. Lives are taken or ruined, and the acts "justified" because the cause has to be saved due to the energies already invested in it. Meanwhile, Percy commits an act against justice to get a client free of a murder charge, an act against his innocent wife which destroys his marriage, and an act of murder to preserve his cause. He does not seem to know just how he sunk that low, or how to recover. He has an affair after his wife leaves him that seems loveless and even lust-less, yet it leads to tragedy for the father of the girl with whom he sleeps. In some ways the book is a replaying of the lost Confederate cause of the Civil War. I've stated some of its weaknesses, but I must say that I did want to stick it through. I came to care about Percy and wanted to find out how it ended, even though Percy is not fully likeable. There is one earlier review posted on this site, and that writer dissects the novel more skillfully than I can. I agree with his assessment. Worth reading if you have a special interest in Penn Warren, or in Kentucky, or tobacco history, or in how organizations with high-minded goals can be corrupted by forceful leaders or strained circumstances.

Sticks with you like resin from tobacco plants
Though it has now been almost 30 years since I last spent a fall afternoon cutting tobacco, spearing the stalks onto wooden staves, and hanging the staves into the curing barn, I still remember the smell of the plants, the stickiness of the resin, the glint of the cutting and spearing tools. This tenuous link to a much earlier time, the time of the tobacco wars that rocked rural Kentucky and Tennessee just before WWII, provided me with just a sliver of insight to the hard times Robert Penn Warren depicts in his first novel, Night Rider.

The protagonist, Percy Munn, is an affable but pliable young lawyer, happily married with a growing law practice when he is drawn into supporting "The Association," an ardent band of tobacco farmers, including doctors, politicians, and other men whom "Perse" admires and who in turn admire him for his oratory skills, leadership, and status. Percy, himself a tobacco farmer, and the association work to break the economic monopoly exerted by the big tobacco companies (those bastards were evil well before they started lying to the public about the addictive nature of their deadly products). But when legal and ethical means are not enough, the collective leadership starts down a slippery slope of coercing nonassociation members to join or else face the consequences. Bands of "night riders" fan out across countryside, first destroying the crops of those who refused their entreaties to join up, then property, until even the taking of human life is justified as a means to their end once they have made the decision to torch the tobacco warehouses in Bardsville and the other towns in the vicinity.

Percy Munn finds himself at the center, and as other men whom he admired peel off from The Association because their moral bearing will not allow their continued participation, Percy eventually finds himself cut off from his wife; men such as Capt. Todd whom he greatly admired; Lucille Christian, the woman who tries to save him from himself; and eventually the leaders of The Association who let him take a fall for something he did not do.

The story is properly characterized as a tragedy even though Percy Munn is not as noble a central figure as one might expect. His great weakness is that he attaches himself to causes without much thought of the consequences. In other words, he is an idealist, but a flawed one. Though Percy's fall is in part caused by his flaws, a series of betrayals---sometimes he is the betrayer and other times he is betrayed---also conspire against him. When loyalty becomes more a currency than a principal, tragedy is inevitable.

Robert Penn Warren captures the speech and mannerisms of this main characters effectively, but he does not develop three-dimensional characters, with the exception of Willie Proudfit, the hard-scrabble, nearly destitute farmer who is something of a mystic who lives life fully and with a fervor Perse cannot experience as he continues his spiral inward. The landscape and settings seem more like those rendered by wood cuttings rather than a photograph. Some of Robert Penn Warren's digressions meander for pages without bolstering the story, and at times the allegorical and naturalistic elements of the novel seem at war with one another.

If permitted, I might rate this novel three and a half stars. Reading Night Rider is a worthwhile book for wintertime reading, butit is not the finest work by the author who was to become the first Poet Laureate of the United States. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Very nice stuff.
Robert Penn Warren, Now and Then: New Poems 1976-1978 (Random House, 1978)

Ah,the good old days. Robert Penn Warren was a horny old goat in his seventies, and Random House still published poetry. For that matter, the birthplaces of poets were still considered as possible sites for museums. What happened?

You can't tell from this book. Well, you maybe could, but the difference is subtle (which is, of course, much of the problem in telling good poetry from bad). Warren gives us a collection of mixed formal and free verse, with the free verse having such strong rhythms it often feels as if, when you have gone from a rhymed poem to a free verse poem, there's something missing in the free verse. Would that all rhyming poetry had such a quality to it.

Warren free verse, as well, is excellent, and there are thousands, maybe millions, of would-be free verse writers who could (if they knew what they were looking for) learn a great deal about how to write effective free verse from this collection of work. Warren, who's been writing poetry since before some of the modern-day bards' grandfathers were alive, was the last of a breed when he died in 1989. The last of the original New Critics, not old enough to remember the Civil War, but old enough to have gotten firsthand tales from relatives. (One resists the urge to tie Warren to Allen Gurganus' oldest living Confederate widow. It is difficult, but one does so.) Old enough, certainly, to not only remember when poetry was considered a good part of this nutritious breakfast, but to have been publishing at the time. Not only that, but to be good enough at it to have landed a major contract with a major publishing house.

The problem is that it's sometimes, as I said above, very hard to tell what makes for good poetry and what makes for bad poetry. In 99.9% of cases, poetry that strays from the image makes for bad poetry. Poetry and value judgments do not mix, in the main, though millions have tried to make them do so. If the poem doesn't make you see tings in your head, it's not a poem. Most of the time. There are a handful of poets over the years who have been able to pull it off (and most of their stuff is very much in the imagist tradition, they just know how and when to stray). Robert Penn Warren is one of those poets. Explaining why is rather like trying to bottle and market smoke without using mirrors. Read it, and perhaps you will understand. **** ... Read more

Product Description
Telling a story that reflects the main current of American literary activity, with many significant acquaintances adding richness along the way--including Allen Tate, Albert Erskine, Katherine Anne Porter, and Andrew Lytle--this biography offers an in-depth profile of Robert Penn Warren--the man and the artist. 16 pp. of photos. 544 pp. Print ads. 20,000 print.Amazon.com Review
This is an exhaustive study of the life of poet, novelist, andRhodes Scholar Robert Penn Warren, stretching from his early yearsgrowing up in Guthrie, Kentucky, to his death in Stratton,Vermont. Blotner reveals a man of maniacal energy and turbulentemotion, whose seemingly charmed life was laced with a strain ofdark tragedy.This is the fullest account available of the author'slife and a requisite read for those who desire a fuller understandingof his life and works. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Robert Was Controversial
A True-Blue Southern Writer of the Fugitive Group., October 24, 2006
The South Shall Rise Again Literary Style., August 24, 2005
Robert Penn Warren is a disguished Southern writer, born in Guthrie, Kentucky. Since he graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, we like to claim him as one of us. The first book of his I read was A PLACE TO COME TO. He went on to get degrees from University of California, Yale, and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1930.

He was a most prolific writer, some of the main ones I enjoyed were THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR, JEFFERSON DAVIS GETS HIS CITIZENSHIP BACK, JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF A MARTYR, BAND OF ANGELS (a movie was made of this), ALL THE KING'S MEN (won Pulitizer Prize for Fiction) and EYES, ETC.: A MEMOIR. He wrote a famous play called ALL THE KING'S MEN and many volumes of poems, most especially AUDUBON: A VISION, CHIEF JOSEPH OF THE NEZ PERCE, PROMISES (1957, which won the Pulitizer Prize for Poetry) and NOW AND THEN (his third Pulitizer Prize).

In 1944-45, he was the second occupant of the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. He received numerous other awards for his writing of all sorts, as he continued to be a professor of English. He was one of a special group of Vanderbilt-educated writers, including some well known personages as prolific as he and as well-loved. He did an in-depth study of Melville. He was a controversial figure in his old age, but always the true blue Southern gentleman. Bill had his picture taken with him at Martin College.

"What is a man but his passion?"
The recent publication of Robert Penn Warren: A Biography by Joseph Blotner may very well announcethe definitive biography ofone of the most famous American men of letters, a work which is both eminently readable and thoroughly enjoyable, imitating to a great degree the work ofMr. Blotner's subject.

The work is readable because the biographer uses the strictly chronological method, introducing the book with a calendar of important events in Warren's personal and professional life and repeating relevant dates at the top of every page. The reader is guided from RPW's birth in Kentucky to a poetry-loving fatherand a school teachingmother through a lonely childhood when thefrail undersized youngster lived in a self-contained world of books. We learn how the 17 year oldlost his chance for a naval career at Annapolis, his fondest dream, when his younger brother flung a piece of coal over a hedge and hit RPW in the eye, the left eye which he would later lose to surgery, and how he entered Vanderbilt University and met John Crowe Ransom, his teacher, the first poet he had ever seen, his idol with whom he shared his own poems in private.

Aided by the vehicle of Blotner's lucid prose style, we travel with Warren as he wins assistantships, fellowships, and scholarships from Vanderbilt to the University of California to Yale and finally to Oxford. We watch him settle into married life, become editor of the Southern Review,and earn fame with his novel All the King's Men.

Like the best biographers, Blotner does not avoid the dark side of his subject.He shows Warren's poetic preoccupation with the loving but aloof father figure, a reflection of his own. He tries to explain Warren's attempted suicide in college as the result of an emotional breakdown because he had fallen so far behind in his studies. He describes the often heart-rending details of Warren's relationship with his first wife whose neurasthenic personality forced her to spend most of her time bedridden and the rest of it fighting withher husband. He devotes the latter part of the book to a detailed description of RPW's last years when, his body riddled by cancer, he wished for death, which arrived mercifully in 1989.

Besides being readable, Mr. Blotner's work is highly entertaining, made more so by his vast research and his way of scattering quotations from letters and works of RPW into the biography's running commentary. We see the human being, not the literary giant,in his letters to friends, such as the following written to Katherine Anne Porter when he was struggling with All the King's Men: "At times I feel that I see my way through the tangle; then at moments, I feel like throwing the whole damned thing into the Tiber." We learn where his passion always was when, being awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, thereby gaining long desired financial independence, he writes: "I've stopped writing anything I don't want to write. Poetry is where my heart is."

If there is anyfault to Mr. Blotner's presentation, it is that, like many other biographers, he has become enamored of his subject. He sometimes interrupts his story with subjective praises, such as, "America's preeminent man of letters, master of genres, prodigiously creative, heavy with awards and prizes honoring his genius, Robert Penn Warren was also that rare being, a genuinely good man."In this case, Mr. Blotner perhaps should not be blamed. RPW was, after all,the only writer ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for two genres, fiction and poetry, and twice for the latter. How many other writers excelled in so many genres, including essays, poems, novels, historical fiction, biographies?Perhaps Mr. Blotner's passion for RPW can be forgiven when we consider his subject's view ofart and life,"What is man but his passion?" (Audubon: A Vision). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Warren
Penn Warren offers a unique glimpse of southern culture in the 1940's.This collection is comprehensive and leave you ready for other books.

Highly underrated author.
Robert Penn Warren, The Circus in the Attic (Dell, 1947)

The back jacket of the book says, "These stories come from the pen of one of America's half-dozen great writers." Given the time period of the book's release, that was really saying something. Something accurate, but something nonetheless. Penn Warren (who won the Pulitzer two year's before for All the King's Men) wrote the stories in this book over the course of fifteen years. Most were previously published.

The book is framed with two novellas, the title story and "Prime Leaf," with a number of shorter works in between. As with most of Penn Warren's work, the tales are about depression-era and WW2-era life in the American south, people going on about their day-to-day business. A number of the stories deal with the same town, and the same characters pass in and out of them, so the reader gets the feeling of getting to know different aspects of the town as he goes from story to story.

Part of the magic of Penn Warren's work is the ability to simultaneously expose to the reader the quiet dignity of the proletariat and the basic stupidity of human nature. Not an easy thing to make the reader respect the people he's laughing at. But that's exactly what happens time and again in this book. The characters do dumb things for various reasons, but we always understand what those reasons are, and most of the time we can see how the character gets from the reason to the justification to the act without a problem. And while there's always a moral to be had, Robert Penn Warren is certainly not Aesop. The moral is there, waiting to be found, but the reader who's not interested in the morality of the tales is allowed to go off on his merry way and not contemplate the deeper meaning of what's here. That, too, is part of Robert Penn Warren's gift. *** 1/2

Haunting, lovely, and memorable
I have been a fan of Warren's writing for many years.He is known for his novels, yet in many of those the most poignant and moving parts are the inserts, the chapters placed there to highlight the main story.CassMastern evokes so much, that it is impossible to imagine AKM without it. Warren achieves much the samee here...while not every story is amasterpiece, at least 2, The Circus in the Attic, and Blackberry Winter,will linger long in the memory.These are stories of a different era,slow, warm, evocative, suggestive and delightful. ... Read more

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A Place To Come To
As advertised, and well worth the minimal cost.The dealer did a yoeman's job in overcoming an obstacle presented by my having updated my payment information.Highly recommended. ... Read more