Liberal Arts Blog — Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) — Only Winner Of APulitzer Prize For Both Fiction (1947) And Poetry (1959,1979)
Liberal Arts Blog — Tuesday is the Joy of Literature, Language, Religion, and Culture Day
Today’s Topic: Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) — only winner of a Pulitzer Prize for both Fiction (1947) and Poetry (1959,1979)
Thanks to Chris Satterthwaite for inspiring me to check out Robert Penn Warren. Are you a fan? Favorite book?
Favorite poem? Favorite sentence? Favorite paragraph? Favorite anecdote?
Today, a few quotes — first a set from his novel, All the King’s Men (1947) and then from his poetry. “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 the light by which we may see — and what we see is life.”
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
ALL THE KING’S MEN (1947) — a fictionalized account of the life of Huey Long (1893–1935), Governor, then Senator from Louisiana, famous for his “Share the Wealth” program and his motto, “Every Man a King.” Long was assassinated in 1935 by a physician named Carl Weiss. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1947 and has been turned into a film twice — once in 1949, and then again in 2006. The first was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won two (for Best Picture and Best Actor). The second, despite an all-star cast was a total flop. Below is “Huey Long’s Monument” — at 450 feet high, the tallest state capitol building in the United States. Long has been described as a demagogue, an American fascist, and a “left wing populist.”
1. “All the words we speak meant nothing and there was only the pulse in the blood and the twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog’s leg in the experiment when the electric current goes through.”
2. “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie (diaper) to the stench of the shroud There is always something.”
3. “It may be the reason they don’t seem real to you is that you aren’t very real yourself.”
NB: “For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.”
“The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different.” “Fof nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us.” (a “canna” is a type of flower)
“TELL ME A STORY” — “Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a young boy, stood in a dirt road…”
1. “Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood in a dirt road, in first dark, and heard the great goose hoot northward.”
2. “I could not see them, there being no moon and the stars sparse. I heard them. I did not know what was happening in my heart.”
3. “It was the season before the elderberry blooms, therefore they were going north. The sound was passing northward.”
NB: “Tell me a story. In this century, and moment of mania. Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances and starlight. The name of the story will be Time. But you must not pronounced its name. Tell me a story of deep delight.”
EVENING HAWK — “from plane of light to plane, wings dipping through geometries and orchids that the sunset builds….” (below Robert Penn Warren)
1. “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 tumultuous avalanche of light above pines and the guttural gorge, the hawk comes.”
2. “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 wach 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.”
3. “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.”
NB: “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.”
A WAY TO LOVE GOD — “Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true….”
1. “Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true, and the line where the incoming swell from the sunset Pacific first leans and staggers to break will tell all you need to know about submarine geography, and your father’s death rattle provides all biographical data required for the Who’s Who of the dead.”
2. “I cannot recall what I started to tell you, but at least I can say how night-long I have lain under the stars and heard the mountains moan in their sleep. By daylight, they remember nothing, and tgo about their lawful occasions of not going anywhere except in slow disintegration. At night, they rememvber, whower, that there is something they cannot remember. So moan. Theirs is the perfected pain of conscience that of forgetting the crime, and I hope you have not suffered it. I have.”
3. “I do not recall what had burdened my tongue, but urge you to think on the slug’s white belly, how sick-slick and soft, On the hairiness of stars, silver, silver, while the silence blows like wind by, and on the sea’s virgin bosom unveiled to give suck to the wavering serpent of the moon; and in the distance in plaza, piazza, place, platz, and square, boot heels, like history being born, on cobbles bang.”
NB: “Everything seems like an echo of something else. And when, by the heair, the headsman held up the head of Mary of Scots, the lips kept on moving. But without a sound. The lips, they were trying to say something very important. But I had forgotten to mention an upland of wind-tortued stone white in darkness, and tall, but when no wind mist gathers and once on the Sarre at midnight, I watched the sheep huddling. Their eyes stared into nothingness. In that mist-diffused light their eyes were stupid and round like the eyes of fat fish in muddy water, or of a scholar who lost faith in his calling.”
“Their jaws did not move. Shreds fo dry grass, gray in the gray mist-light, hung from the side of the jaw, unmoving. You would think that nothing would ever again happen. That may be a way to love God.”
FOOTNOTE — biographical tidbits
1. Born in Guthrie, Kentucky, near the Tennessee border, a town of about 900. The population is now about 1300.
2. “In 1921 his left eye was removed as the result of an accident with his brother, which canceled his appointment to the US Naval Academy.”
3. Graduated from Vanderbilt in 1925. Masters from Yale in 1927. Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, B Litt, 1930.
NB: Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Carter in 1980. In 2005, the US Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp on the anniversary of his birth. (See above)
Robert Penn Warren — Wikipedia
Robert Penn Warren — Wikiquote
All the King’s Men — Wikiquote
All the King’s Men (1949 film) — Wikipedia
Political views of Huey Long — Wikipedia
Robert Penn Warren | Poetry Foundation
The Most Anthologized Poems of the Last 25 Years
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY INTO FOURTEEN BOOK-LENGTH PDFS:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
Please share the coolest thing you learned this week related to words, language, literature, religion, culture.
Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in your life related to Words, Language, Literature (eg. quotes, poetry, vocabulary) that you have not yet shared.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart. Continuity is key to depth of thought.
