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
And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.
Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff...Willie, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they'll love it and come back for more, but, for heaven's sakes, don't try to improve their minds.
So little time we live in Time, And we learn all so painfully, That we may spare this hour's term To practice for Eternity.
Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?
Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)
There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
Dirt's a funny thing,' the Boss said. 'Come to think of it, there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except what's under water, and that's dirt too. It's dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?
The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
History is all explained by geography.
How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?
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, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.