Literary Birthday – 24 April – Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren was born on 24 April 1905 and died on 15 September 1989.

Robert Penn Warren Quotes

1. Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
2. The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
3. The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions, and accidents of ordinary life.
4. The past is always a rebuke to the present.
5. Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
6. Tell me a story of deep delight.
7. The poem . . . is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
8. A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.
9. The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic. He explored the erosion of the South’s traditional, rural values in his writing. He won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King’s Men and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. All The King’s Men won an Academy Award for best motion picture in 1949. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. He taught at Yale University from 1951 to 1973. Warren founded and edited The Southern Review. His books, Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction, both written with Cleanth Brooks, spread the doctrines of New Criticism. He became the first poet laureate of the United States in 1986.

Source for quotes
Source for image: Oscar White, Pach Brothers Studio, Public Domain, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar