Joseph Blotner, Faulkner’s biographer, has now brought his considerable abilities to bear on the life and work of Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989), who began as a member of the extraordinary group of writers starting out in Tennessee during the Twenties, many of them students of John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt University. Blotner vividly renders Warren’s long and preternaturally productive career and makes a convincing case for him in his crowning years as “America’s preeminent man of letters, master of genres, prodigiously creative, heavy with awards and prizes honoring his genius.”

These are high claims, but Warren was the author of some forty books, was America’s first Poet Laureate, won the Pulitzer Prize three times, and was given just about every other honor available to an American writer. With Cleanth Brooks, he edited Understanding Poetry, a textbook that made close readers of a generation of American college students, revolutionizing the study of poetry, which heretofore had focused on literary history and biography to the neglect of actual poems. Though he curtly rejected for himself the label of New Critic--perhaps regarding it as reductive—he was an ornament of the school. Blotner concludes the sentence I partially quoted above with a kind of assessment rarely encountered in the current age of the biographer as character assassin and performance artist: “Robert Penn Warren was also that rare being, a genuinely good man.”

Blotner is an old-fashioned biographer who has written an imminently readable book which puts its subject squarely at center stage: he does not refer to his subject by his first name, does not attempt to correct his political views, does not set out to dig up dirt or psychoanalyze. What emerges in the nearly six hundred pages of this book is a solidly researched and very welcome account of a figure so central to our literature that he may easily be taken for granted.

An artist need not be a genius to produce great work, but certain great artists are best described by the term, and Warren was one of them. Matriculating at Vanderbilt at age sixteen, the Kentuckian made an immediate impression on older student writers like Allen Tate, who described him: “Turning round I saw the most remarkable looking boy I had ever laid eyes on. He was tall and thin, and when he walked across the room he made a sliding shuffle, as if his bones didn’t belong to one another… . This remarkable young man was ‘Red,’ Robert Penn Warren, the most gifted person I have ever known.”

The young man soon outgrew the impression of uncoordinated frailty he gave; “Red” made himself into a powerful physical specimen. A recurring motif in this book is the vigorous regimen Warren followed throughout his life: swimming a mile in the morning, working out with barbells, walking as many as five miles a day, snowshoeing through the woods around his house in Vermont. An observer described him at seventy-four: “his thinning red hair sweat-plastered across his skull and his face flushed with exertion, he looks like an aged fighting cock.” When he was almost eighty a physician treating him for prostate cancer and severe osteoarthritis was surprised to learn that he was still lifting weights and doing more than one hundred knee squats a day. This energy and exertion are reflective of the discipline and force with which Warren wrote.

If, as Edmund Wilson proposed, the bow is not vouchsafed until the wound is incurred, Warren’s wounding happened when at age sixteen his left eye was severely damaged by a baseball-sized chunk of coal his younger brother threw over a hedge, not knowing that Warren was lying on the ground, deep in thought, on the other side. The eye would continue to torment him, and he would eventually lose the sight in it altogether. The accident spoiled his dream of going to Annapolis; he would instead go to college fifty miles south of his home town of Guthrie, Kentucky, at Vanderbilt, where he made friends and found his vocation.

The wonderful thing about a biography that concentrates on telling a story is that the reader has all the material to ponder for himself the narrative of a lifetime, with its good luck and bad luck and unpredictable twists of fate. Warren’s father had written poetry in his youth and had aspired to a literary career, but ended up as a banker, merchant, and landowner, eventually failing in these endeavors. Later in life Robert Penn Warren would comment on the fate that led him to succeed in something his father would have liked to pursue. Completing another circle, Warren’s son, Gabriel, would become a sailor and boat builder, realizing in the next generation his father’s ambition to make a life at sea. Robert Penn Warren’s daughter is the distinguished poet Rosanna Warren.

Another pleasure of this book is reading Blotner’s lucid account of the academic and literary life as it was lived at the height of his subject’s career. He recounts the sad history of Vanderbilt’s failure to recognize and support the literary movement that was exploding in its classrooms and in the discussion group that spawned the influential magazine The Fugitive during the 1920s, and its 1930 agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. In the same way that it lost John Crowe Ransom to tiny Kenyon College in Ohio, Warren’s alma mater strung him along with the provisional appointments familiar to those on the lower rungs of academia’s tenure ladder until the young writer was offered more attractive and remunerative work at Louisiana State University, which Huey P. Long, “The Kingfish,” was determined to make into a major university.

At LSU, Warren’s encounter with Long provided the material that would help establish him as novelist, editor, and critic and supply him with a lifetime of royalties. Long was “a political genius,” in Warren’s words, who played many roles: “vulgarian, buffoon, clown, dude, sentimental dreamer, man of ruthless action, coward, wit, philosopher, orator.” The rise and fall of Huey Long became the subject first of a play, Proud Flesh, which Warren wrote in the late 1930s. “The whole thing is to be in five acts, and twelve scenes,” Warren wrote Kenneth Burke, “each act being introduced by a chorus. The choruses are: highway, cops, football players, steel construction workers on the new capitol, the women who are connected with Governor Strong, and the surgeons.” The play would—perhaps fortunately, given this sketch of what it novel All the King’s Men, and Governor Strong would become Willie Stark.

None of Warren’s ten novels has received the attention accorded to All the King’s Men, a bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1946. The book has been called the definitive American political novel. Willie Stark and Huey Long are probably inextricable in the minds of most readers with a knowledge of Southern politics. Warren commented later in his life: “When I am asked how much All the King’s Men owes to the actual politics of Louisiana in the ’30s, I can only be sure that if I had never gone to live in Louisiana and if Huey Long had not existed, the novel would never have been written.” Still, its author chose to emphasize that it was primarily a work of fiction. The controlling image of this book is the highway as an emblem of the brutality of populist, machine-style politics, with its parallels to the fascism that Warren observed in Italy while he was writing the novel there during the late 1930s: “You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires.” That’s only the first half of the sentence, which continues for eighty-eight more words.

The stylistic debt to Faulkner is obvious; but we miss a lot if we think of Warren purely as a Southern writer. The book is as much about the existential struggle of its narrator, Jack Burden, as it is about Southern politics; Jack Burden, a “political operative” in today’s lingo, is the spiritual ancestor of Walker Percy’s conflicted heroes. His wisecracking tone has something in common, too, with Raymond Chandler’s first-person narrators. Here is an example of Jack Burden’s sardonic voice:

Then I went over and sat beside the Dumonde girl, who had been provided for my delight. She was a prettyish, dark girl, well got-up but lacking something, too brittle and vivacious, with a trick of lassoing you with her anxious brown eyes and fluttering the eyelids as she cinched the rope and then saying what her mother had told her ten years before to say. “Oh, Mr. Burden, they say you’re in politics, oh, it must be just fascinating!” …

“No, I’m not in politics,” I said. “I’ve just got a job.”

“Tell me about your job, Mr. Burden.”

“I’m an office boy,” I said.

Warren was a consummate professional, one of the most successful writers of his generation. Blotner records briskly and pleasurably the details of book contracts, print runs, word counts, foundation grants. All of this serves to give a vivid picture of Warren’s professional life, enjoyable both to those of us who write for money and those who wonder how it is done. Of World Enough and Time (1950), Blotner reports: “By early July the novel was third on the bestseller list. Random House followed the first printing of thirty-seven thousand copies with ten thousand more three days after publication and kept the hardcover in print for the next twenty-four years.”

Warren began as a poet and, after his ten novels, his literary criticism, his biographies of John Brown and Jefferson Davis, his social and political nonfiction books like the 1956 work Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, he ended as a poet. In his early work he brought the poise and learning of the Metaphysicals, whom T. S. Eliot was resurrecting from the nineteenth century’s neglect, to the backwoods landscape, water moccasins, and lurking violence of his native South. Here is the last stanza of “Pondy Woods,” published in 1942:

In Pondy Woods in the summer’s drouth
Lurk fever and the cottonmouth.
And buzzards over Pondy Woods
Achieve the blue tense altitudes,
Drifting high in the pure sunshine
Till the sun in gold decline;
Then golden and hieratic through
The night their eyes burn two by two.

You will seldom encounter a “hieratic” buzzard elsewhere, unless perhaps in the work of Warren’s older colleague Allen Tate. Southern literature in this century, with Faulkner’s latinate periods and Ransom’s elegant stanzas, was a place where classical learning met rural plainness in the aftermath of tragic historical events. A great literature grew out of this moment of supreme irony, when the Old South, with its Greek Revival mansions and African slaves, the storied valor of its Confederate army in the proximate past, stood silhouetted against the violent and corrupt present of the Ku Klux Klan, Mr. Crump of Memphis, and Huey P. Long of Louisiana—with Martin Luther King, Kmart, and Bill Clinton in its not too distant future.

During the last twenty years of his life Warren returned more and more to poetry, spurred to some extent, Blotner suggests, by the disappointing critical response to his fiction. In doing so the Kentucky-born Warren, who had spent most of his adult life in Connecticut, Italy, and Vermont, was completing the circle of his life as a writer. The poetry from his Selected Poems: New and Old in 1966 to his New and Selected Poems in 1985 represents an autumnal flowering rare in any career and reminiscent of the late poetry of Hardy and Yeats. Part of the solidity and resonance of late Warren springs from his full acknowledgment of his grounding in the past, as in “Old-Time Childhood in Kentucky”:

Strange, into the past I first grew. I handled

the old bullet-mold.
I drew out a saber, touched an old bayonet,

I dreamed
Of the death-scream. Old spurs I tried on.
The first great General Jackson had ridden

just north to our state
To make a duel legal—or avoid the law.
It was all for honor. He said: “I would have

killed him
Even with his hot lead in my heart.” This for

honor. I longed
To understand. I said the magic word.
I longed to say it aloud.

In these miraculous late poems, Warren breathed truth into the cliché “an American original.” His vision was intensely historical, because he knew and pondered the American legacy with a rare seriousness. His poetic line carried the ebullient confidence of Whitman underpinned by the dark vision of Faulkner. His sinewy free verse had been prepared for by hard hours learning the discipline of rhyme, meter, and the stanza as well as the fluidity gained from writing hundreds of thousands of words of prose.

Typical emblems from these poems are the hawk (“Look! Look! he is climbing the last light/ Who knows neither Time nor error, and under/ Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings/ Into shadow”) and the lone man gazing up at the stars (“Can I see Arcturus from where I stand?”). One comes away from a consideration of Warren’s life and work, transparently and convincingly presented in Joseph Blotner’s biography, with a sense of having been in the presence of largeness, ardor, seriousness, and “the possibility of joy in the world’s tangled and hieroglyphic beauty.”