Robert Penn Warren, born in Guthrie, Kentucky in 1905, was one of the twentieth century"s most eminent American writers. He was a distinguished novelist and poet, literary critic, essayist, short story writer, and coeditor of numerous textbooks. He also a founding editor of The Southern Review, a journal of literary criticism and political thought. The primary influences on Robert Warren"s career as a poet were probably his Kentucky boyhood, and his relationships with his father and his maternal grandfather. As a boy, Warren spent many hours on his grandfather"s farm, absorbing stories of the Civil War and the local tobacco...
or beautiful." He continued to deal with timeless themes, and his late poetry is considered among his best.

Late in life Warren said: "I"m a naturalist. I don"t believe in God. But I want to find meaning in life. I refuse to believe it"s merely a dreary sequence of events. So I write stories and poetry. My work is my testimony . . . I want to give myself in sacrifice of some sort. To participate in the common body of human life . . . my poetry lets me do that, but that sounds so trite to say."