Winner of the C. Hugh Holman Award A central figure in twentieth-century American literature, Robert Penn Warren (1905- 1989) was appointed by the Library of Congress as the first Poet Laureate of the United States in 1985. Although better known for his fiction, especially his novel All the King's Men, it is mainly his poetry- spanning sixty years, fifteen volumes of verse, and a wide range of styles- that reveals Warren to be one of America's foremost men of letters. In this indispensable volume, John Burt, Warren's literary executor, has assembled every poem Warren ever published (with the exception of Brother to Dragons), including the many poems he published in The Fugitive and other magazines, as well as those that appeared in his small press works and broadsides. Burt has also exhaustively collated all of the published versions of Warren's poems- which, in some cases, appeared as many as six different times with substantive revisions in every line- as well as his typescripts and proofs. And since Warren never seemed to reread any of his books without a pencil in his hand, Burt has referred to Warren's personal library copies. This comprehensive edition also contains textual notes, lists of emendations, and explanatory notes. Warren was born and raised in Guthrie, Kentucky, where southern agrarian values and a predilection for storytelling were ingrained in him as a young boy. By 1925, when he graduated from Vanderbilt University, he was already the most promising of that exceptional set of poets and intellectuals known as the Fugitives. Warren devoted most of the 1940s and 1950s to writing prose and literary criticism, but from the late 1950s he composed primarily poetry, with each successive volume of verse that he penned demonstrating his rigorous and growing commitment to that genre. The mature visionary power and technical virtuosity of his work in the 1970s and early 1980s emanated from his strongly held belief that ""only insofar as the work [of art] establishes and expresses a self can it engage us."" Many of Warren's later poems, which he deemed ""some of my best,"" rejoice in the possibilities of old age and the poet's ability for ""continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth, a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process.

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.