“How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.” – Robert Penn Warren
The first time I read All The King’s Men. I was
stunned by how quickly I was transported into the story and forgot that I was
reading a novel and not someone’s life story. Penn Warren, born April 24, 1905, had that remarkable ability to put his reader both
into the place and into the lives of those about whom he was writing.
Founder of the 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, of course, 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 jump-starting the career of actor Broderick Crawford as the lead
character Willie Stark.
In 1958, Penn Warren won his second Pulitzer for his book of
poems Promises: Poems 1954-1956, which also won the
National Book Award for poetry. And, in
1979 he was awarded his third Pulitzer for Now and Then.
Born in Kentucky near the Tennessee border, he was known as
a segregationist as a young man but greatly shifted his views adopting a high
profile as a supporter of racial integration – and becoming close friends with both Malcolm X
and Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the 1940s he served as Consultant in Poetry to the
Library of Congress and in 1986 he was named the first U.S. Poet Laureate. Among his other honors were selection for the
Jefferson Lecture, the federal government’s highest honor for achievement in
the humanities; the Presidential Medal of Freedom; a MacArthur Fellowship; and the National Medal of Arts.
Robert Penn Warren
When asked about the many poems he wrote over his lifetime,
he said whenever he felt the urge to write one, he just 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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