John Burt’s Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren is more broadly representative of Warren’s poetry than any previous selected gathering. More than two hundred poems from every phase grace the volume, a vehicle ideal for sampling―or soaking in―the finest of Warren’s rich output.
With each poem, Burt has carefully located the version that constitutes Warren’s final revision. His introduction gives an eloquent overview of the poet’s career, touching on every published book of verse and highlighting significant lines. A “selected” collection in the truest sense, featuring several previously unpublished pieces, this treasure is at once new and familiar.
At the heart of Warren’s poetry is a celebration of man’s intellect and imagination, his integral place within nature, and his relationship to time and the past; ultimately, joy coexists with the knowledge of life’s many mysteries, including its tragedies. Selected Poems, a generous survey and a convenient compendium, is the shining portal to this greatly gifted poet.
Burt chose a slightly different theory of the copy-text to follow in this edition from what he used in The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. In that volume he chose to preserve the integrity of Warren’s poetic sequences, poems that he collected together and gave an over-title to, so Burt followed the original appearance of those poems in their first book form, even though when Warren published sections of these sequences in the volumes of Selected Poems he published in 1943, 1966, 1976, and 1985 he revised them extensively. In The Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, Burt followed the last revision Warren made of the individual poems in his several volumes of Selected Poems, except in cases where the final 1985 New and Selected Poems was not reliable.
ISBN 978-0807126776 (paper)
ISBN 978-0807126769 (hardback)
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