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unpublished pieces, this treasure is at once new and familiar.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.
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