New and Selected Poems 1923-1985

by Robert Penn Warren

This volume includes selections from all of the poet's previous poetic works and fifty new poems, never before published, to introduce this collection

Genres: Poetry

322 pages, Paperback

Published March 12, 1985

About the author

Robert Penn Warren was 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 literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.

Reviews

[Melrose · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Mortal Limit

I saw the hawk ride updraft in the sunset over Wyoming.
It rose from coniferous darkness, past gray jags
Of mercilessness, past whiteness, into the gloaming
Of dream-spectral light above the last purity of snow-snags.
Or, having tasted that atmosphere's thinness, does it
Hang motionless in dying vision before"It knows it will accept the mortal limit,
And swing into the great circular downwardness that will restore
The breath of earth: of rock: of rot: of other such items,
and the darkness of whatever dream we clutch?

From Hope

In the orchidaceous light of evening
watch how, from the lowest hedge-leaf, creeps,
grass blade to blade, the purpling shadow. It spreads
it's spectral ash beneath the leveling, last
gold rays that, westward, have found apertures
from the magnificent disaster of the day.

Against gold light, beneath the maple leaf,
a pale blue gathers, accumulates, sifts
downwards to modulate the flowery softness
of gold intrusive through the blackening spruce boughs.
spruces heighten the last glory beyond by their stubborness.
they seem rigid in blackened bronze.

From Interlude of Summer

Evening by evening, the climactic melodrama of
day flares from behind the blackening silhouette
of the mountain for the last and majestic pyre of
what of today you can remember, or forget.

From Have you ever eaten stars

A glade on the bench of a mountain,
where beech, birch, and spruce meet
in peace, though in peace not intermingled
around the slight hallow, upholstered
in woods-earth damp, and soft, centuries old--
spruce needle, beech leaf, birch leaf, ground-pine.

And fern frond, and deadfall of birch, grass blade
so biblically frail, and sparse in that precinct where
the sunray makes only its brief
and perfunctory noontide visitation.
all, all in that cycle's beneficence
of being are slowly absorbed--oh, slowly--into
what once had fed them, and now,
in silence as absolute as death, or as vision in breathlessness,
your foot may come, or mine,
as when i, sweat soaked in summer's savagery,
might come here and stand
in that damp-cool, and peace of process,
and hear, somewhere, a summer-thinned brook descending
past stone, and stone, it's musical stair.

some more favorites

Fear and Trembling
Grackles, Goodbye
Vision
Safe in Shade
Unless
Heart of Autumn
Evening Hawk
Blow, West Wind
Stargazing
Where the Slow Fig's Purple Sloth

[Randy Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Penn Warren is poet of white male rustic loneliness. He writes with original lyricism about nature and the great awestruck, unknown of being alive.

I particularly love ‘Mortal Limit’ which ends with these great words, ‘the darkness of whatever dream we clutch?’

That said, he is a southern white man publishing a poem that includes the N word. I wish he had done better.

[Antonio Higgins · Rating 2 out of 5]

⭐ 2.5 - There were some good poems, and many good lines. There were also many poems that were not that great.

[Jason Kinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read these poems twice all the way through now. There's nobody else like Robert Penn Warren, because his career spans so long, he was such an influential critic and he's brilliant. And he can spit some serious rhymes, both internal and external, using words I don't know (and I know a lot of words). Because he grew up in Kentucky and went to Harvard, and because he started life in Jim Crow and ended his life in the West looking at mountains and hawks, he's got a lot to write about. He's at his best when he's writing about the natural world, pondering the fox, the hawk, or the birds that nestle in sea cliffs.

[John]

poetry

[B · Rating 5 out of 5]

From this book, I learned that it's entirely natural to write about sex and death in the same poem.