In these two essays, one of America's most honored writers fastens on the interrelation of American democracy and poetry and the concept of selfhood vital to each. "I really don't want to make a noise like a pundit," Mr. Warren declares, "What I do want to do is to return us--and myself most of all--to a scrutiny of our own experience of our own world." Indeed, Democracy and Poetry offers one of the most pertinent and strongly personal meditations on our condition to have appeared in recent letters. Our native "poetry," that is, literature and art, in general, is a social document, is "diagnostic," and has often been a corrosive criticism of our democracy, Mr. Warren argues. Persuasively, and movingly, he shows that all of "art" and all that goes into the making of democracy require a free and responsible self. Yet the American experience has been one of the decay of the notion of self. Our astounding success jeopardized what we promised to create--the free man. For a century and a half the conception of the self has been dwindling, separating itself from traditional values, moral identity, and a secure relation with community. Lonely heroes in a bankrupt civilization, then protest, despair, aimlessness, and violence, have marked our literature. The anguish of Robert Penn Warren's own poetic vision of art and democracy is soothed only by his belief that poetry--the making of art can nourish and at least do something toward the rescue of democracy; he shows how art can be- come a healer, can be "therapeutic." In the face of disintegrative forces set loose in a business and technetronic society, it is poetry that affirms the notion of the self. It is a model of the organized self, an emblem of the struggle for the achieving self, and of the self in a community. More and more as our modern technetronic society races toward the abolition of the self, and diverges from a culture created to enhance the notion of selfhood, poetry becomes indispensable. Compelling, resonant, memorable, Democracy and Poetry is a major testament not only to the vitality of poetry, but also to a faith in democracy.

Crisscrossing the sprawling landscape of Robert Penn Warren, James H. Justus offers us the first comprehensive survey of Warren’s complete canon, including the poetry of 1980. The temptation for everyone who has written on Warren, our most distinguished man of letters still active in American literature, asserts Justus, “is to analyze those themes and moral situations that, because they recur so frequently and obsessively, constitute the massive centrality of an entire corpus.” Justus attempts “to emphasize the ways by which we become aware of such themes and situations, the technical accomplishment of their rendering, which alone justifies our thinking of Warren as a literary artist.” The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren shows how Warren’s work—his fiction, poetry, literary criticism, historical and personal essays, journalism—is shaped largely by the circumstances not only of his birth and early career as a border-state southerner but also oh his training and later career as a transregional artist and intellectual. Dividing his book into four parts, Justus discusses in Part I Warren’s cycle of themes—the most enduring of which is self-knowledge, the very source of Warren’s life work. He devotes Part II to Warren’s poetry: the “mannered archaism” of his early work, the increasing mastery of the tendencies practiced by his fellow Agrarians—the metaphysical mode—and the advantage of technique in his most recent poems. Part III concern’s Warren’s nonfiction prose, with emphasis on Who Speaks for the Negro and I’ll Take My Stand. In Part IV, Justus, analyzes the novels as political and moral statements in Night Rider, At Heaven’s Gate, and All the King’s Men; as romance and history in World Enough and Time, Band of Angels, and Wilderness; and as “art of transparency,” in The Cave, Flood, Meet Me in the Green Glen, and A Place to Come To. Justus demonstrates Warren’s relish for “crowded densities of actuality” as fulfilled in the novelist’s skill in observing detail. “No other writer has made so much out of our cultural artifacts. . . . WPA murals, big houses and shotgun bungalows, letters and broadsides.” Warren continues in a southern literary tradition. The values of the country and small town, those affecting attitudes toward social cohesion and Christian assumptions about the nature of man, are often seen in conflict with the values of a life governed by art and the academy. Justus also places Warren’s work in the larger context of the various streams of American writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He cites in particular Warren’s unresolved relationship to Emerson and compares Warren to Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In examining Warren’s technical accomplishments, Justus proclaims the novelist/poet to be a man whose distinguished career has surpassed those of Edmund Wilson and Allen Tate. Warren calls himself “a little footnote” in the long history of the intellectual tension between transcendentalism and puritanism. Certainly readers of The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren will begin to understand how Warren’s discrete works relate to each other, how from poems to novels to prose—early and late “nothing is lost.” The undertaking by Justus is massive; the accomplishment, monumental.

Grimshaw examines the writer's views about the primacy of self-knowledge and explores the painful and arduous path his protagonists must follow to gain such knowledge and the interrelationship of his artistic endeavors, which were woven together by common thematic concerns - history, time, truth, responsibility, love, hope, and endurance.".

Willie Stark's obsession with political power leads to the ultimate corruption of his gubernatorial administration.

In his sixth novel, The Cave (1959), Robert Penn Warren tells the story of a young man trapped in a cave in fictional Johntown, Tennessee. His predicament becomes the center of national attention as television cameras, promoters, and newscasters converge on the small town to exploit the rescue attempts and the thousands of spectators gathered at the mouth of the cave.

Robert Penn Warren after Audubon embraces research on developmental psychology, gerontology, and end-of-life studies to offer provocative new readings of Warren's later poems, seeing in them an autobiographical epic focused on the process of aging, the inevitability of death, and the possibility of transcendence. Among the autobiographical elements the author identifies are Warren's loneliness during his later years; his alternating feelings of personal satisfaction and emptiness toward his literary achievements; and, at times, the impotence of memory. The author concludes that the finest of all of Warren's literary efforts can be found in his later works, after Audubon: A Vision.

"Splendid…[Darnton gives] us vivid, hard-won detail, illuminating narrative, and subtle, original insight." —Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression in distinctive ways. In eighteenth-century France, censors, authors, and booksellers collaborated in making literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege. Even as the king's censors outlawed works by Voltaire, Rousseau, and other celebrated Enlightenment writers, the head censor himself incubated Diderot’s great Encyclopedie by hiding the banned project’s papers in his Paris townhouse. Relationships at court trumped principle in the Old Regime. Shaken by the Sepoy uprising in 1857, the British Raj undertook a vast surveillance of every aspect of Indian life, including its literary output. Years later the outrage stirred by the British partition of Bengal led the Raj to put this knowledge to use. Seeking to suppress Indian publications that it deemed seditious, the British held hearings in which literary criticism led to prison sentences. Their efforts to meld imperial power and liberal principle fed a growing Indian opposition. In Communist East Germany, censorship was a component of the party program to engineer society. Behind the unmarked office doors of Ninety Clara-Zetkin Street in East Berlin, censors developed annual plans for literature in negotiation with high party officials and prominent writers. A system so pervasive that it lodged inside the authors’ heads as self-censorship, it left visible scars in the nation’s literature. By rooting censorship in the particulars of history, Darnton's revealing study enables us to think more clearly about efforts to control expression past and present.

Amantha Starr, born and raised by a doting father on a Kentucky plantation in the years before the Civil War, is the heroine of this powerfully dramatic novel. At her father's death Amantha learns that her mother was a slave and that she, too, is to be sold into servitude. What follows is a vast panorama of one of the most turbulent periods of American History as seen through the eyes of star-crossed young woman. Amantha soon finds herself in New Orleans, where she spends the war years with Hamish Bond, a slave trader. At war’s end, she marries Tobias Sears, a Union officer and Emersonian idealist. Despite sporadic periods of contentment, Amantha finds life with Tobias trying, and she is haunted still by her tangled past. “Oh, who am I?” she asks at the beginning of the novel. Only after many years, after achieving a hard-won wisdom and maturity, does she begin to understand that question. Band of Angels puts on ready display Robert Penn Warren’s prodigious gifts. First published in 1955, it is one of the most searing and vivid fictional accounts of the Civil War era ever written.

Warren's first novel set in the tobacco wars of Kentucky in the early 20th century.