Crisscrossing the sprawling landscape of Robert Penn Warren, James H. Justus offers us the first comprehensive survey of Warrens complete canon, including the poetry of 1980. The temptation for everyone who has written on Warren, our most distinguished man of letters still active in American literature, asserts Justus, is to analyze those themes and moral situations that, because they recur so frequently and obsessively, constitute the massive centrality of an entire corpus. Justus attempts to emphasize the ways by which we become aware of such themes and situations, the technical accomplishment of their rendering, which alone justifies our thinking of Warren as a literary artist. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren shows how Warrens workhis fiction, poetry, literary criticism, historical and personal essays, journalismis shaped largely by the circumstances not only of his birth and early career as a border-state southerner but also oh his training and later career as a transregional artist and intellectual.
Dividing his book into four parts, Justus discusses in Part I Warrens cycle of themesthe most enduring of which is self-knowledge, the very source of Warrens life work. He devotes Part II to Warrens poetry: the mannered archaism of his early work, the increasing mastery of the tendencies practiced by his fellow Agrariansthe metaphysical modeand the advantage of technique in his most recent poems.
Part III concerns Warrens nonfiction prose, with emphasis on Who Speaks for the Negro and Ill Take My Stand . In Part IV, Justus, analyzes the novels as political and moral statements in Night Rider, At Heavens Gate , and All the Kings Men ; as romance and history in World Enough and Time, Band of Angels , and Wilderness ; and as art of transparency, in The Cave, Flood, Meet Me in the Green Glen , and A Place to Come To . Justus demonstrates Warrens relish for crowded densities of actuality as fulfilled in the novelists skill in observing detail. No other writer has made so much out of our cultural artifacts. . . . WPA murals, big houses and shotgun bungalows, letters and broadsides.
Warren continues in a southern literary tradition. The values of the country and small town, those affecting attitudes toward social cohesion and Christian assumptions about the nature of man, are often seen in conflict with the values of a life governed by art and the academy. Justus also places Warrens work in the larger context of the various streams of American writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He cites in particular Warrens unresolved relationship to Emerson and compares Warren to Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
In examining Warrens technical accomplishments, Justus proclaims the novelist/poet to be a man whose distinguished career has surpassed those of Edmund Wilson and Allen Tate. Warren calls himself a little footnote in the long history of the intellectual tension between transcendentalism and puritanism. Certainly readers of The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren will begin to understand how Warrens discrete works relate to each other, how from poems to novels to proseearly and late nothing is lost. The undertaking by Justus is massive; the accomplishment, monumental.
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