He traces through the poems a family chronicle, moving from the frontier to the late twentieth century, and set in a landscape that is clearly derived from the Kentucky of Warren's boyhood. The little town of Guthrie, divided by railroad tracks, with its two burial grounds for whites and blacks, becomes in the poems a town of both memory and imagination, peopled by characters many of whom are recognizable to Warren's contemporaries. The images of a black man fleeing through swampy woods outside the town, of a grayfaced man who led a lynch mob, of a mad druggist making a list of people to poison, all have counterparts in Guthrie's history. Then and Now is a revealing and provocative study of the poetic process in a poet who is thought of as the originator of the biographical fallacy.
He traces through the poems a family chronicle, moving from the frontier to the late twentieth century, and set in a landscape that is clearly derived from the Kentucky of Warren's boyhood. The little town of Guthrie, divided by railroad tracks, with its two burial grounds for whites and blacks, becomes in the poems a town of both memory and imagination, peopled by characters many of whom are recognizable to Warren's contemporaries. The images of a black man fleeing through swampy woods outside the town, of a grayfaced man who led a lynch mob, of a mad druggist making a list of people to poison, all have counterparts in Guthrie's history. Then and Now is a revealing and provocative study of the poetic process in a poet who is thought of as the originator of the biographical fallacy.
Then and Now: The Personal Past in the Poetry of Robert Penn Warren
200Then and Now: The Personal Past in the Poetry of Robert Penn Warren
200Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780813155234 |
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Publisher: | University Press of Kentucky |
Publication date: | 07/15/2014 |
Pages: | 200 |
Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.60(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |