Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warrenwas an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for his novel All the King's Menand the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth24 April 1905
CountryUnited States of America
They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.
Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.
Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.
For whatever you live is life.
For the truth is a terrible thing.
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of... What you don't know know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist... If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.
The past is always a rebuke to the present.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
It is a human defect--to try to know one's self by the self of another.