Quotes by Robert Penn Warren

“For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.”

“The poem is a little myth of mans capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.”

“A young mans ambition is to get along in the world and make a place for himself-half your life goes that way, till youre 45 or 50. Then, if youre lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.”

“The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, Oh, just let me enjoy the poem.”

“I dont expect youll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.”

“Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. Theyre inexpensive and easy to procure.”

“More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past”

“Ive been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. Its a kind of pain I cant do without.”

“Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write”

“Something is going to happen...”

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something(All The Kings Men)

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

The poem is a little myth of mans capacity of making life meaningful.

BeautyIs the fume-track of necessity. This thought Is therapeutic.If, after severalApplications, you do not findRelief, consult your family physician

And the testicles of the fathers hang down like old lace

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind that become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters.

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there werent any other people there wouldnt be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.

you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History.

If you want him to do it, youve got to change the picture of the world inside his head.