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Robert Penn Warren Quotes
1905–1989
Robert Penn Warren (April 24 1905 – September 15 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic, and one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Also known as: Warren, Robert Penn
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33 quotes
Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
There are a lot of people who would make better citizens if they were content to be just negatively relevant.
I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.
Everything seems an echo of something else.
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
Vision and Leadership in Sustainable Development (1999)
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
In separateness only does love learn definition.
What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They’re inexpensive and easy to procure.
It can't be treated as a job. It's got to be treated as a non-job or an anti-job.
Interview with Richard B. Sale (1969)
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 (1946)
I don’t expect you’ll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
In silence the heart raves. It utters words
A young man’s ambition — to get along in the world and make a place for himself — half your life goes that way, till you’re 45 or 50. Then, if you’re lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.
If, in the middle of World War II, a general could be writing a poem, then maybe I was not so irrelevant after all. Maybe the general was doing more for victory by writing a poem than he would be by commanding an army. At least, he might be doing less harm.
I longed to know the world's name.
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
I cannot recall what I started to tell you, but at least
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