Flight And Pursuit:on Robert Penn Warren’s Poetry

Robert Penn Warren’s poetry has earned him a great number of awards and credits, including two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, National Book Award and the first Poet Laureate of America, and has accordingly attracted much attention form the foreign academia. In contrast, the attention it has got from the academic circle in China is at a rather low level, let alone its farmiliarity to the common readers. Therefore, this dissertation picks the Robert Penn Warren’s poetry as the object of study and continues to explore this unfrequented field of modem western poetry.In studying Robert Penn Warren’s poetry, this dissertation adopts the view of "flight and pursuit":Chapter one of the main body of this dissertation probes into the tradition of "flight and pursuit" in American literary history and its link to Robert Penn Warren’s poetry, demonstating the American culture and literature’s, especially the Literary Group of Fugitives’ influence on the themes and writing techiniques of Warren’s poetry. Chapter two illustrates the "flight and pursuit" embodied in the themes, images and structures of Robert Penn Warren’s poetry with plentiful examples, revealing Warren’s ingrained complex of "flight and pursuit" and its reflection of Warren’s diagnosis and therapy of the various diseases of society. Chapter three explores the "flight and pursuit" embodied in the temporal outlook displayed in Warren’s poetry. In this chapter Warren’s poems are compared and contrasted with some of William Blake’s and Thomas Hardy’s poems, demonstrating their similarites and differences in "taking flight from the absolute temporal outlook". Besides, Warren’s netlike pattern of Time is distinct from and somewhat superior to the traditonal linear or circular pattern of Time, exhibiting Warren’s unconstrained temporal conception which "takes flight from traditional temporal outlook" and "pursues an ampler excavation of life experience and its meaning". Chapter four analyzes the "flight and pursuit" embodied in the historical outlook displayed in Warren’s poetry. This chapter presents Warren’s view that history is an inalienable and organic part of the continuum of Time and that history is the source of self cognition and social cognition. In this chapter, the American South, among other examples, is employed to display the poet’s "flight from the oblivion or distortion of history" and his "pursuit of putting history in a right perspective and making the most of history to serve the present and the future". The conclusion part summarizes the embodiment of "flight and pursuit" in Warren’s poetry and its significance, especially its inspiration to the people fumbling for the way out of the present predicaments. In brief, this dissertation first traces the "flight and pursuit" in Warren’s poetry back to its source, then elaborates on its incarnation in the themes, images and structures, and finally focuses on the temopral and historical outlook of Warren to further explore its connotation. In this way, with the help of the "flight and pursuit" perspective, the variegated content, profound thinking and unique devices of Warren’s poetry are unfolded in front of the readers.With the close reading and semantic criticism of the New Criticism as the central method, and the Myth-Archetypal literary criticism, the Historical and Cultural criticism and so on as auxiliary ones, Warren’s poetry has been interpreted and discussed in a relatively complete way in this dissertation. The adoption of the simple and original "flight and pursuit" perspective prevents this dissertation from falling into the old ruts and constraints of existing literary theories, and allows a more vivid demonstration of Warren’s ponderings over the predicaments and outlets of humankind nowadays. In addition, this perspective of "flight and pursuit" displays better the correlation among Warren’s poems, the American literary tradition and the American history, enhancing the readers’comprehension of the three at the same time and filling the blank of domestic research in this respect to a degree. The horizontal juxtaposing of Warren’s poems with that of Blake’s and Hardy’s in the discussion of "flight and pursuit" embodied in Warren’s temporal outlook, and the case study of the American South in the discussion of "flight and pursuit" embodied in Warren’s historical outlook are some of the distinguishing features of this dissertation. The abundant close reading of texts all the way is another highlight of this dissertation. The number and scale of Warren’s poems covered hereof ranks the first among relative domestic researches and all of them are translated by the present author, not only unfolding a more comprehensive picture of Warren’s poetry, but also contributing a little to the translation of Warren’s poems and the introduction of them to the Chinese readers.