Warren at Heaven's Gate

"God damn it," Robert Penn Warren complained to Lambert Davis, his editor at Harcourt Brace, eight months before All the King's Men would be published in August 1946, "I never felt so full of ideas for stories and poems, and here I am working on the text book." (Modern Rhetoric and all his other textbooks were done with Cleanth Brooks.) But, in fact, we discover from these letters that Warren, after finishing At Heaven's Gate (1943), worked concurrently on All the King's Men, "The Ballad of Billie Potts" (1944), and his magisterial essay on Coleridge, "A Poem of Pure Imagination" (1946). He also completed "Variation: Ode to Fear" and the five-part sequence "Mexico Is a Foreign Country" which, with the ballad, were collected in Selected Poems 1923–1943 (1944); these were the last poems Warren would complete for ten years. His best short story, "Blackberry Winter," was also written at this time. It was first published by the Cummington Press (1946) before its inclusion with thirteen other stories in The Circus in the Attic (1947). Then, with All the King's Men out of the way, Warren began to work in earnest on World Enough and Time (1950), but he also managed to complete Modern Rhetoric (1949) and a revised edition of Understanding Poetry (1950). And on 28 July 1950 he wrote his father that he "was supposed to get a revised edition of the Approach [to Literature] by September 15." "I didn't want to fool with it," but he added that "it has been a very good property, sometimes 30,000 copies a year, and it's a shame to let it lapse." There is a possible reference to what became Brother to Dragons (1953) as early as 31 January 1944, when he wrote Allen Tate that he had "another long piece going, a companion to 'Billie Potts,' but I can't predict the date of completion." Certainly by 1948, however, Warren was reporting good progress with this "ballad," which as yet had still not taken its final form as "A Tale in Verse and Voices."

Except for a year out of the classroom, 1944–1945, as Tate's successor as the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress, and several extended leaves to his beloved Italy, Warren continued to teach at the University of Minnesota as a displaced person, as he described himself to Frank Owsley on 31 January 1950. He wrote Robert Heilman in October 1948 that he had "190 students in my classes, with a new course to work up." After 1942 Warren would never again live in the South; it would be a place to come to. But, following a two-week trip "down South" in 1951, he wrote Heilman on 17 March that it "was full of spring in Tennessee and Carolina, mocking birds screaming all night, everything in bloom, the air like milk. I began to feel that life had a significance and beauty that I'd forgotten."

Warren also managed to stay in California ("land of my dreams, wet and dry," he described the place to Brainard Cheney on 1 November 1950) during the final editing of the film version of All the King's Men, a process that fascinated him enormously. And despite the fact the film was set in a western state ("fear of legal difficulties") and "the end is not RPW's end" (to Albert Erskine, 18 April 1949), he generally approved of the treatment, and especially of the "spectacularly good performances" of Broderick Crawford as Willie and Mercedes McCambridge as Sadie. "Willie comes off as sort of black-and-white," he wrote Frank Owsley, but "that is the price of the movies, I guess. You can't do much with ironies and complications in the final effect."

The Warren coffers certainly swelled during these years. For example, funds from royalties and the movie deal with Columbia Pictures produced a check...