Времето като хипноза

by Robert Penn Warren, Георги Рупчев (Translator), Петър Няголов (Translator)

John Burt's Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren is more broadly representative of Warren's poetry than any previous such gartering. More than two hundred poems from every phase grace the volume, a vehicle ideal for sampling or soaking in the finest of Warren's rich output.

With each poem, Burt has carefully located the version that constitutes Warren's final revision. His introduction gives an eloquent overview of the poet's career, touching on every published book of verse and highlighting significant lines. A "selected" collection in the truest sense, featuring several previously unpublished pieces, this treasure is at once new and familiar.

Burt showcases some very early verse, such as "The Bird and the Stone" and "Oxford City Wall", the only poem known to derive from Warren's days as a Rhodes scholar. There are also portions from the book-length poems, Brother to Dragons and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. Arranged chronologically, the selections run the course from darker, more self-consciously formal poems of the 1920s and early 1930s, including "Kentucky Mountain Farm", "Terror", and the most ambitious poem of Warren's early phase, "The Ballad of Billie Potts"; to a looser style and a fusion of personal and political concerns in the 1950s and 1960s.

Warren's late phase yielded more than half of his entire poetic opus. A new stylistic boldness elevates his poems to the sublime from 1968 to 1985, as exemplified in the intense "Island of Summer" sequence, the violence-filled "Natural History", and his most famous poem, "Evening Hawk". In his final working years there surfaces a kind of shadow autobiography in verse as well as a self-doubt that edges at times toward despair --as revealed in Warren's darkest meditation on American history, "Going West" -- before the calmer and more reflective mode of his last volume, which also contains the Hiroshima atom-bombing reconsideration "New Dawn".

At the heart of Warren's poetry is a celebration of man's intellect and imagination, his integral place within nature, and his relationship to time and the past; ultimately, joy coexists with the knowledge of life's many mysteries, including its tragedies. Selected Poems, a generous survey and a convenient compendium, is the shining portal to this greatly gifted poet.

Genres: Poetry

200 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1944

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

[Richard Seltzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the honor and privilege of taking a creative writing course with "Red" at Yale in 1969.

[Sarah Rider]

I read Audubon: A Vision by John Burt, for CWR 480 - Research for Writers.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Less an indictment of the poet (a wonderful and in some ways overlooked writer) than the edition-- an introduction to Penn Warren's poetry would benefit from a more judicious selection, and this seems geared toward scholars rather than readers. That said, as regards the work itself, even in the later poems, which seem strongest, the diction is occasionally needlessly archaic and the adjectives are occasionally curiously redundant.