Robert Penn Warren (b.1905- d.1989) was the third appointment as our nation's poet and, interestingly, he was also a peer and former roommate to the second appointment to that position Allen Tate. Mr. Warren was born in Guthrie, Todd County, Kentucky, on April 24, 1905. He entered Vanderbilt University in 1921, where he became the youngest member of the group of Southern poets called the Fugitives. The name of this group was also the name of the University Literary magazine formed by the poem peers that included: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Merrill Moore.
Warren's first poems were published in The Fugitive, a magazine which the group published from 1922 to 1925. The Fugitives were advocates of the rural Southern agrarian tradition and based their poetry and critical perspective on classical aesthetic ideals.
Mr. Warren was a prolific and life long poet, but he is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel All the King's Men.
1925 to 1927
Warren was a teaching fellow at The University of California, where he earned a master degree.
1930
He taught at Vanderbilt, Louisiana State, The University of Minnesota, and Yale University.
1938
Published his nonfiction book so-written with Cleanth Brooks: Understanding Poetry which was used for years afterward as a textbook, it became instrumental in influencing something called the New Criticism.
1944-1945
Mr. Warren was appointed and served as the third Consultant in Poetry (the old title that later became the U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.
1947
Pulitzer Prize for his novel All the King's Men.
1958
Pulitzer Prize for his book of poetry his Promises: Poems, 1954-1956 and also won the Sidney Hillman Award, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, and the National Book Award
1972 -1988
Warren served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets
1979
Pulitzer Prize for his book of poetry Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978.
1981
Warren was selected as a MacArthur Fellow.
1989
He died September 15.
Evening Hawk by Robert Penn Warren
From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.
The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.
Look!Look!he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.
Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics.His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense.The star
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.
If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.
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