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RACIAL POLITICS
AND
ROBERT PENN WARREN'S POETRY
by
ANTHONY SZCZESIUL
12/31/2002. 304pp. 6X9,University
Press of Florida
Notes, bibliography, index. 0-8130-2585-0 $55.00
Robert Penn Warren,
America's first Poet Laureate, three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize,
founder of the New Criticism, and one of the most prolific American poets of
the twentieth century, wrote more about race than perhaps any other white
literary figure of his generation. His was a crucial voice speaking to other
white southerners fearful of the impact of integration on their way of life.
Tracing connections between his changing views on racial politics and his
varying poetic theories and themes, Anthony Szczesiul offers a new
revisionary reading of Warren's diverse and extensive canon of poetry.
Szczesiul delineates the political and ideological
implications of Warren's evolving aesthetic, revealing that Warren's poetry
was in an intensive and ongoing dialogue with its changing social and
historical contexts. Politically, Warren made the dramatic transition from a
segregationist to an integrationist position. Poetically, his career
successfully bridges the modern and postmodern eras of 20th-century American
poetry. Szczesiul demonstrates that Warren's work evolved not simply as a
natural consequence of artistic maturity and development but through
difficult negotiations with issues of self and identity, politics and
aesthetics, individual will and social change, and race and cultural
pluralism. He maintains that Warren's aesthetic conflicts become
especially apparent when we consider his poetry along side his racial
politics. Szczesiul is the
first to thoroughly trace the ways in which Warren's changing thoughts on
race influenced his aesthetic thinking, and vice versa. His frank approach
to this inflammatory subject makes considerable use of unpublished archival
materials, from which Warren emerges as an extremely complex figure with
great contemporary relevance.
"An extremely insightful study of the
relationship between Warren's creative practice and his evolving attitudes
on race."―Ernest
Suarez, Catholic University of America
"Nobody before Szczesiul has been able to
see how Warren's early views hang together with larger convictions about the
nature and work of poetry, and how Warren's famous change of heart about
segregation bore fruit also in a changed view of how poetry can sound, what
subjects it can address, what relationship it has to the life and
consciousness of the poet, and what kinds of relationships between truth and
language are possible in poetry."―John D.
Burt, Brandeis University
Anthony Szczesiul is assistant professor of English at
the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. |
