La esencia americana y la toma de posición del poeta Robert Penn Warren

“I’ve been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It’s a kind of pain I can’t do without.”

— Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren at his desk working on the revisions of a textbook inside of a paper-cluttered barn that is separate from his house, 

April 1956.

The birthplace of poet Robert Penn Warren is in Guthrie, Ky., just over the state line from northeast Montgomery County. / The Leaf-Chronicle

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

Mr. Warren made his Connecticut home in a pair of converted barns surrounded by fields he loved to walk. He and his wife, the writer Eleanor Clark, worked from 9 A.M. to 2 P.M. every day in their studies.

True Love 

Robert Penn Warren

In silence the heart raves.It utters words

Meaningless, that never had

A meaning.I was ten, skinny, red-headed, 

Freckled.In a big black Buick, 

Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat 

In front of the drugstore, sipping something 

Through a straw. There is nothing like 

Beauty. It stops your heart.It

Thickens your blood.It stops your breath.It

Makes you feel dirty.You need a hot bath. 

I leaned against a telephone pole, and watched. 

I thought I would die if she saw me. 

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. 

Her grown brothers walked with the bent-knee 

Swagger of horsemen.They were slick-faced. 

Told jokes in the barbershop. Did no work. 

Their father was what is called a drunkard. 

Whatever he was he stayed on the third floor 

Of the big white farmhouse under the maples for twenty-five years. 

He never came down.They brought everything up to him. 

I did not know what a mortgage was. 

His wife was a good, Christian woman, and prayed. 

When the daughter got married, the old man came down wearing 

An old tail coat, the pleated shirt yellowing. 

The sons propped him.I saw the wedding.There were 

Engraved invitations, it was so fashionable.I thought 

I would cry.I lay in bed that night 

And wondered if she would cry when something was done to her. 

The mortgage was foreclosed. That last word was whispered. 

She never came back.The family 

Sort of drifted off.Nobody wears shiny boots like that now. 

But I know she is beautiful forever, and lives 

In a beautiful house, far away. 

She called my name once.I didn't even know she knew it.

Robert Penn Warren, (1905-1989), was an American novelist, poet, and literary critic. Warren won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for ALL THE KING'S MEN (1946), which describes the rise and fall of a ruthless Southern politician. Warren won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection PROMISES: POEMS 1954-1956, published in 1957. He also won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection NOW AND THEN: POEMS 1976-1978, published in 1978. Warren served as the first poet laureate of the United States in 1986 and 1987

http://www.e-limbo.org/articulo.php/Art/2041

http://www.davidmixner.com/2012/02/page/4/
http://www.robertpennwarren.com/biography.htm
http://mgerwingarch.com/2012/11/20/the-writers-desk/

http://www.entrelineas.org/articulo.asp?id=234#.UQkxWx2zKSp
http://www.theleafchronicle.com/article/20110901/NEWCOMERS/309010013/Celebrities?nclick_check=1