Writing From Those Things In Life

“How do poems grow?  They grow out of your life.” – Robert Penn Warren

Founder of the influential literary journal, The Southern Review, Penn Warren is the only person to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and poetry, and he won that latter award twice.  His first Pulitzer came for All The King’s Men, the 1947 novel about a ruthless Louisiana politician.  It’s one of the few books to also be made into both a movie and an opera, although the movie had much more success, earning the Best Picture Academy Award and Best Actor for Broderick Crawford as lead character Willie Stark. 

      Penn Warren’s second Pulitzer came for his 1958 book of poems Promises: Poems 1954-1956, which also won the National Book Award.  And, in 1979 he earned his third Pulitzer for his poems Now and Then.

Born in Kentucky on April 24, 1905, he was known as a segregationist as a young man but greatly shifted his views as he grew older, adopting a high profile as a supporter of integration – a view reflected in his writings.  He became close friends with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The nation’s first Poet Laureate, Penn Warren also was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom; a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called “genius grant”); and the National Medal in the Arts.  He said whenever he felt the urge to write a poem, he just sat down and did it.   “The urge to write poetry,” he said, “is like having an itch.  When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.”

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