In this Book

summary

Robert Penn Warren's reputation as a poet, though always considerable, has soared in the last decade, as indicated by his recent selection as America's first poet laureate. The Braided Dream is one of the first book-length studies of the poetry that has led to Warren's recent rise to eminence and the first to consider his final collection, Altitudes and Extensions.

In a communicable, jargon-free style that will appeal to the nonacademic reader as well as the serious scholar, Randolph Paul Runyon provides a detailed and illuminating guide to a body of poetry that, despite its greatness, has until now seemed resistant to full understanding.

Every poem of Warren's last four sequences—Now and Then, Being Here, Rumor Verified, and Altitudes and Extensions—is given a close reading, with a precise laying-out of words, phrases, and recurring images that not only enrich the texture of the poetry but are themselves the texture. Runyon demonstrates the relevance of Freud's concept of the dream work of the unconscious to a reading of this tightly interwoven poetry. He shows how Warren's poems assume additional meanings by the poet's very arrangement of them, deepening his thesis by arguing that "poems eat poems" as each reuses and reconceptualizes the imagery of its predecessor, frequently with ironic or parodic effect.

Table of Contents

restricted access Download Full Book
  1. Cover
  2. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
  2. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Contents
  2. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Introduction. Buried Narrative and the Parody of Time
  2. pp. 1-18
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 1. Altitudes and Extensions: "Some Logic Here to Trace"
  2. pp. 19-89
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 2. Rumor Verified: "Caverned Enchainment"
  2. pp. 90-127
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 3. Being Here: "Life's Long Sorites"
  2. pp. 128-173
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 4. Now and Then: "In Its New Ectoplasmic Context"
  2. pp. 174-208
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Afterword
  2. pp. 209-226
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Notes
  2. pp. 227-234
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Appendix. The Order of Warren's Poems
  2. pp. 235-240
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Works Cited
  2. pp. 241-244
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Index of Warren's Works
  2. pp. 245-250
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. General Index
  2. pp. 251-252
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
  2. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
Back To Top

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.