50 Books to Read Before You Die

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Tag: Robert Penn Warren

Off-Topic: Poetry Favorites (Part 3)

March 15, 2018 /

Hello again, class! Time to poetry it up again.

Be sure to check out my other favorite poems with Part 1 and Part 2 of this list. I’ve included links to each poem so you can read them for yourself!

Kipling isn’t one of my favorite writers, but this is certainly one of my favorite poems. It’s built on a series of almost-impossible virtues, with the father-son relationship tagged on for good measure. The poem as a whole paints the perfect ideal to strive for, and I love it.

My favorite lines are “If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim.” It always reminds me that my introverted delights should have a purpose, even if they aren’t clear to begin with.

I think that “The Road Not Taken” has more depth than most people give it credit for. There’s the comparison between the two roads, one slightly more worn than the other, but both inviting and undisturbed. I like the speaker’s internal conflict about which road to take.

But it’s the last lines that keep this poem universal: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Frost made good poetry, and “The Road Not Taken” is one of his best.

This is one of the weirdest poems I’ve ever read. The word choice gets to me every time I read it—“angularity,” “avalanche,” “guttural,” “hieroglyphics” . . . and the image of a hawk’s wings as scythes cutting down stalks of time to describe the passing of a day is beyond creative.

If there’s anything this poem does wrong, it’s overreaching—poetry for poetry’s sake, one step too far. But for me, before reading “Evening Hawk,” poetry was flowers and love metaphors. This is one of the few early poems in my life that changed the game forever.

If “Evening Hawk” is one of the weirdest poems ever, then “The Red Wheelbarrow” is one of the simplest. It’s one of those that’s simple enough for anyone to read, understand, and analyze, but it’s also complete and complex enough to have layers of meaning.

It’s about the length of a sentence—four stanzas of four words each, painting a brief picture of a wheelbarrow. But if you look closely enough, you see the balance of each phrase, the care in each word, the imagery and the symbolism between the lines. It makes me smile and wonder every time I read it.

This Heart of Darkness-inspired poem (blog post pending for that novel) is classic T. S. Eliot—too vague to make complete sense but just beautiful enough so that sense doesn’t matter.

I like Eliot’s artistic choices, and it’s hard to like his work otherwise if you don’t, but it’s not hard to appreciate how powerful his poetry is. “The Hollow Men” showcases the best that modernism is known for—rule-breaking poetry, terror at the collapse of the old world, and a hodgepodge of genre that clashes against itself. It’s pretentious, but incredible.

This poem is dedicated to victims of 9/11, and for that alone it speaks volumes. Collins picks the names of individuals who died on 9/11, one name for every letter of the alphabet (though he asks us to “let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound”). Those names haunt him—or maybe it’s less violent than a haunting . . . it’s more like the names are painted on everything he sees: the rain, the night sky, the shop windows, the bridges and tunnels of the city, and the petals of a flower. It’s a literary memorial; those names, and the lives that they belonged to, remain after the tragedy. Like I said, it speaks volumes.

Of all of the poems I’ve selected (between all three posts) this one is the funniest. Sheehan wrote the exact opposite of a love poem—there was nothing else to call it but “Hate Poem.” She REALLY hates the subject of the poem. Everything about her hates the other person, from the flick of her wrist to the lint under her toenail to the “goldfish of her genius.”

What’s really remarkable is how beautiful the writing is, which is maybe even because of it’s content—it’s full of passion and exquisite hatred, and it’s one of the most enjoyable poems that’s ever crossed my path.

I’m not planning on a Part 4, but at this point, who knows what’ll happen.

Next up, I’m finishing up The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Also by Sylvia Plath, the poem “Lady Lazarus” (found on my Part 2 poetry list) equally deals in the subject of suicide. “Lady Lazarus” and other poems by Plath have a sense of glorifying suicide and death, which certainly makes me uncomfortable, but The Bell Jar seems to be more interested in portraying than glorifying. I don’t think her poetry is better or worse than her novel, but they are absolutely worth comparing, especially since they are eerily close to Plath’s real life suicide attempts and eventual suicide. But more on that next time.

Prof. Jeffrey

Missing From the List: All the King’s Men

December 21, 2017 /

Tis’ the season, class.

All the King’s Men opens with an epigraph from the Purgatory section of The Divine Comedy (which I’m finishing soon)—it says “As long as hope maintains a thread of green.” For Dante, it’s in reference to the souls suffering in purgatory who have the chance at redemption, as long as they don’t lose hope. For the characters in All the King’s Men, it’s a sign for readers that we shouldn’t expect things to look remotely hopeful—but maybe we can find a thread of it somewhere in the corruption, pessimism, and political drama that makes up the story.

It’s not my usual kind of book, but it found a way onto my favorites shelf. I read it in high school, at a time when I thought politics was the muck of humanity, and All the King’s Men hit all the right buttons for me. Willie Stark, the focus of the story, is the populist politician running for governor in a Southern state. Jack Burden (with his not-subtle name) is the political journalist following his campaign, and he narrates the story bespecked with details of his life and Willie’s.

Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark in the 1949 movie adaptation of All the King’s Men.

For those of you in the back, with confused looks on your faces, the term populist (as I understand it) is used for the politician who gains steam by catering to the “common man” and antagonizing everyone else. This usually makes me think of a political character from the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou!—one of the most incredible comedies I’ve ever seen, by the way. The movie’s Depression-era politician brings a dwarf to his campaign rallies and shows him off while claiming to fight for the “little fella,” and that’s why you should vote for him (both characters are later revealed to be members of the KKK, and that about sums up my views on populism). Willie Stark is not far away from this picture. He bribes, badgers, and blackmails his way into political power, all the while smiling at the crowd, coming off even as likable.

When Robert Penn Warren wrote All the King’s Men, he based Stark off of real-life Louisiana governor Huey Long, who was controversial enough to be labeled as both a hero of the people and a dictator. While there are enough politicians in history that have earned that level of controversy, anyone paying attention knows that there are more than a few of them in power now—the kinds of politicians who are obviously two-faced, and have somehow convinced the majority of the public that they are good and wholesome. All the King’s Men is one of the novels I know that handle times of political controversy with clarity—the quality most lacking in such times—and that’s why Warren’s novel made an impression on me, and why it should be on the 50-books list.

Author Robert Penn Warren

And for all that, All the King’s Men simply a good book. The story is told out of chronological order, resembling an archaeological dig, burying down into the past and resurfacing to rewrite the present. Jack’s as unreliable as any narrator from a 20th century novel, and his flawed view of the truth makes the story that much more interesting. The rest of the cast of characters (making up the “king’s men” to Willie Stark as king) are meaningfully portrayed and unnervingly relatable, and they happen to tie into the plot well, too. And it’s got enough symbolism to occupy a literature class for a year.

So, by “good book,” I mean that All the King’s Men challenges the reader, questions universal truths, invests in creative characters, satisfies that literature itch I’m always scratching, and is overall a well-written and much-needed story. That’s just about all the criteria I need.

I don’t have a lot of politically-charged novels up my sleeve, and the ones that come to mind aren’t that praiseworthy, so I’ll have to branch out to that realm when I get the chance, if only to become more aware of what’s going on today. Hopefully I wasn’t too subtle when I talked about current two-faced politicians causing controversy—there’s a lot of disgusting behavior coming from world and local leaders these days. The more we understand, the better we’ll respond when those leaders do something despicable.

Just one of those many reasons to read outside your comfort zone. Food for thought.

Prof. Jeffrey

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