Quotes by Robert Penn Warren

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

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

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.

“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.”

“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.”