Until recent years, the popularity of Robert Penn Warren's fiction, crowned by the ascendancy of All the King's Men (1946) to the status of a classic, has somewhat obscured his achievement as a poet. His development as a poet, however, antedated his first novel (Night Rider , 1939) by almost two decades, and over nearly sixty years he has published some fourteen volumes of verse interspersed with eleven books of fiction, a dozen books of nonfiction prose, and numerous essays and textbooks. This prolific creativity has arguably made Warren his nation's foremost living man of letters--"America's Dean of Letters," according to a 25 August 1980 Newsweek essay.

Far from imagining such a future, Warren grew up in the small town of Guthrie, Kentucky, wanting to be a sea captain. After dividing his boyhood years between his grandfather's farm in summer and his family home during school terms, he actually obtained an appointment...