Robert Penn Warren and the Fugitive Poets

Robert Penn Warren was born on this date (April 24) in 1905. Warren, the most prominent member of a group of poets known as the Fugitives—which also included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson—was one of the great figures of twentieth-century American literature. The Fugitives were formed when Warren, who entered college at the age of sixteen, was an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University. They published the initial issue of The Fugitive literary journal in 1922.

In an informative profile of the Fugitives, the excellent video above provides background details about the group, as well as audio clips of all four poets reading their work. The video also outlines the paths taken by the individual poets later in their careers, especially on specific issues such as race relations in the South. However, the Fugitives represented only the opening of an extraordinary literary career for Robert Penn Warren during which he authored many impressive works, including sixteen collections of poetry, ten books of fiction, more than a dozen books of nonfiction, and a play.

Warren received just about every honor an American writer could achieve, including three Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the National Medal for Literature, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize, the Van Wyck Brooks Award, the Emerson-Thoreau Award from the Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Copernicus Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Harriet Monroe Prize for Poetry, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Hubbell Memorial Award from the Modern Language Association, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 1944 Warren was appointed as Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress, and in 1986 he was selected as the first official Poet Laureate of the United States.

[Readers are invited to visit previous posts at “One Poet’s Notes” concerning Robert Penn Warren: “Robert Penn Warren: ‘Pure and Impure Poetry,’” “Robert Penn Warren ‘Birth of Love,’” and “Robert Penn Warren: ‘The Nature of a Mirror.’”]