Portrait Of A Father

by Robert Penn Warren

One of America's great poets writes of his father, lost through death and discovered again through insistent recollection. A death in the family forces a re-sorting and reshaping of all that we can recall of times and people gone from us as we measure our identities by their remembered images.

While prowling in the past, Warren is drawn to likenesses between himself and his father, between himself and others of his family. The poet finds that his father too, in his long silent youth, ventured into the writing of poetry, as have so many, but in time put it away for other things. Gradually this elegy for his father becomes Warren's reverie on the many Warrens and Penns who live now only in his memory. We encounter his mother and his mother's mother, his father's Warren line thrown back over three generations, as he draws forth sameness, giving shape and full form and then sharp recognition to family members who were and must yet remain mysteries. Then we see that Warren is delineating the tenuous threads of all our many unsettled and fragmentary American family histories, that he is tracing all our steps from the coast over mountain trails into the dark wilderness to the west. With him, when we stop to consider our loved and lost ones, we realize the delicacy of our accepted relationships.

In this autobiographical essay and the accompanying poem sequence that echoes it, "Mortmain," Warren's look into the mystery of the past evokes for us the loss and recovery and wonder that death brings.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1988

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

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The shadow of woods, but pauses, turns, grins once,
And is gone. And one high oak leaf stirs gray, and the air,
Stirring, freshens to the far favor of rain.

This was a blow to the chest. Late in life RPW gave us a memoir of his memories of his father, not a biographical sketch, but a tapestry of his own memories braced with rolling suppositions of what it could have all meant. Most of the artifacts of his childhood are of course books. His father's inscription is almost a summons but just as inscrutable in terms as to the noumenal. A fascinating motif is Warren remembering conversations just outside of clear hearing, the sounds of talking without the presence of words.
Maybe that is my entire life? Though within my situation I hear the words, I simply don't understand them. Of course, the reader then imagines his own parents, his own life. Is there a similar impulse to commit, to preserve or just reflect?

The memoir ends and is followed in train by a few poems, all of which are electric.