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.

Novelists
Poets

Also known as: Warren, Robert Penn

Random Robert Penn Warren quote

33 quotes

Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel. . . not simply working from the given, but toward the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, "What do I really feel about this?"

The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."

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.

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that. It was real blood, not tomato catsup or the pale ectoplasm of statistics, that wet the ground at Bloody Angle and darkened the waters of Bloody Pond.

The Legacy of the Civil War (1961)

Accept these images for what they are —
Out of the past a fragile element
Of substance into accident.
I would speak honestly and of a full heart;
I would speak surely for the tale is short,
And the soul's remorseless catalogue
Assumes its quick and piteous sum.

What glass unwinking gives our trust
Its image back, what echo names
The names we hurl at namelessness?

Love's Voice (1935)

For, no: not faith by fable lives,
But from the faith the fable springs
— It never is the song that gives
Tongue life, it is the tongue that sings;
And sings the song.

Love's Voice (1935)

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.

How could I exist in the same world with that brightness?
Two years later she smiled at me. She
Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead.

For fire flames but in the heart of a colder fire.
All voice is but echo caught from a sound-less voice.
Height is not deprivation of valley, nor defect of desire.
But defines, for the fortunate, that joy in
which all joys should rejoice.

At night
They remember, however, that there is something they cannot remember.
So moan. Theirs is the perfected pain of conscience that
Of forgetting the crime, and I hope you have not suffered it. I have.

If you could not accept the past and its burden, there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and [...] if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.

All the King's Men (1946)

The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him.

All the King's Men (1946)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Penn Warren (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.