Evening Hawk

Traditionally, Robert Penn Warren has been grouped with Southern poets, and particularly the Fugitives, the group made up of Vanderbilt teachers and students in the 1920s. However, his deeper interest in nature poetry and imagery also puts him in line with the earlier English Romantic poets from the 19th century, like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His interest in language led him to the works of dramatist William Shakespeare, and the Modernist T. S. Eliot was an admittedly important influence (See: Further Reading & Resources).

Shakespeare’s understanding of human character and Eliot’s themes about the meaning of human history and memory, along with his rhythmic cadence based on human speech, appealed to Warren. However, scholar King Adkins hints that as Warren’s work evolved, particularly after a decade where he did not write poetry (1943-1954), he also turned to American poet Robert Frost for inspiration. While Warren rejected Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideals, he responded to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sherwood Anderson, and particularly Frost.

Frost, like Warren, did not hold “Eliot and Ezra Pound[‘s] reference to authority and literary tradition” (60) but did explore nature in a philosophical sense. Adkins notes that Warren was seen as a poet who “embraced