Arts and Letters

Robert Penn Warren excelled in three modes of writing: the novel, literary criticism, and poetry. His early novel, All the King's Men, based on Huey Long, was later made into a movie. Understanding Poetry was a widely used anthology edited with Cleanth Brooks. His poetry writing increased with time, producing in his later years several closely spaced memorable volumes.

Robert Penn Warren came from the South but lived with his wife Eleanor Clark in Connecticut and Vermont. My wife Betty and I would visit them in Vermont: the next day I would drive Eleanor to Yaddo in Saratoga Springs for a shared board meeting. Sometimes Red would go. Once when we returned Betty and Red were not in the house. We drove out the gate, turned right, and found them almost a mile down the road. They had turned to walk back home and welcomed a ride.

Robert Penn Warren may be compared with Edgar Allan Poe in the nineteenth century. Red belonged very much to the twentieth. Poe wrote short stories, critical articles, and poetry. They were very different in appearance and personality but both were Southerners. Once Poe got to Yaddo at Saratoga Springs, stood beside a melancholy tarn near the mansion, and was heard to say "Nevermore." This is fantasy but if my friend Red Warren had assumed the same posture, which he would not, I should think he would have left off the first letter.