---

Robert Penn Warren, Poet and Author, Dies

Date: September 16, 1989, Saturday, Late Edition - Final Section 1; Page 1, Column 2; Cultural Desk
Byline:
Lead: LEAD: Robert Penn Warren, whose complex poetry and novels drawn from Southern life formed an intricate mirror of the human experience, died of cancer yesterday at his summer home in Stratton, Vt. He was 84 years old and lived in Fairfield, Conn.
Text:

Robert Penn Warren, whose complex poetry and novels drawn from Southern life formed an intricate mirror of the human experience, died of cancer yesterday at his summer home in Stratton, Vt. He was 84 years old and lived in Fairfield, Conn.

Mr. Warren, the nation's first Poet Laureate, won the first of three Pulitzer Prizes in 1947 for ''All the King's Men,'' a richly detailed study of the life and times of a populist politician named Willie Stark, who begins his career as a champion of the people but becomes corrupted by the power they vest in him. The character was inspired by the Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long.

Mr. Warren was also a respected critic and teacher who was on the faculties of Yale, Louisiana State University and the University of Minnesota, among others. Two textbooks he wrote began as pamphlets for his first classes and became widely used in colleges across the country. Popularity and Respect

After the publication of ''All the King's Men'' in 1946, Sinclair Lewis hailed Mr. Warren as ''the most talented writer of the South and one of the most important writers of the country.'' In 1949 the novel was made into a movie, which won the Academy Award for best picture of the year.

Mr. Warren's works enjoyed wide popularity, appearing on best-seller lists and as book-club selections, and they never lost the respect of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In a 1953 essay, the writer recalled growing up in a house with a grandfather who quoted Byron's poetry and a father who read history aloud to his children whenever he could. 'Only One Cockleburr'

''Everybody knows a thousand stories,'' Mr. Warren told an interviewer in 1981. ''But only one cockleburr catches in your fur and that subject is your question. You live with that question. You may not even know what that question is. It hangs around a long time. I've carried a novel as long as 20 years, and some poems longer than that.''

He was a poet of complex works dotted with philosophical reflections -poetry he knew would appeal to a small group of readers. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry twice, in 1957 and 1979.

His longtime friend, the educator and writer Cleanth Brooks, said yesterday, ''He was a gentle and fine spirit, a valiant warrior for the truth, and one of our very finest poets.''

Mr. Warren was named Poet Laureate in 1986 and held the post for two years.

During his long career, he wrote learned articles for magazines - one of which, The Southern Review, he co-edited - on such writers as William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter, and he made a textual analysis of Coleridge's ''Rime of the Ancient Mariner.''

Mr. Warren was an influential figure in the teaching of English literature. His books ''Understanding Poetry'' and ''Understanding Fiction,'' which he wrote with Mr. Brooks, taught an entire generation how to read a work of literature and helped make the New Criticism dominant in the decade surrounding World War II. It was an approach to criticism that regarded the work at hand as autonomous, as an artifact whose structure and substance could be analyzed without respect to social, biographical and political details. History as Springboard

In an essay on John Crowe Ransom, who was his most important influence, Mr. Warren wrote, ''The problem at the center of Ransom's work is especially modern - but it implies some history.'' The same sentence could be applied to Mr. Warren himself, for in his fiction, as in a good deal of his poetry, historical elements served as the imaginative springboard for the work.

The current laureate, Howard Nemerov, said yesterday: '' 'All the King's Men' is certainly one of the great American novels.'' He also praised Mr. Warren's poetry.

''He was reticent, ironic, reserved and perfectly charming,'' Mr. Nemerov said, ''and I loved and respected him quite apart from his work.''

Ransom once pointed out the impoverishment of modern life and the handicap caused to a writer by the destruction of commonly held myths that had been the heritage of the Western world.

Mr. Warren made up for that by searching out and finding historical incidents, folk tales and community anecdotes that he exploited and expanded in his fiction. Uprisings and Murders

''Night Rider,'' an early novel, used the tobacco war of 1906 in his native Kentucky, when farmers fought the tobacco trust. ''World Enough and Time'' centered on the 19th-century murder trial of Jeremy Beauchamp, whose case Mr. Warren had read about in a penny pamphlet. The heart of ''Brother to Dragons,'' a lengthy narrative poem, is built around the brutal killing of a slave by the nephews of Thomas Jefferson for what they considered a slight to the family. And for ''Audubon: A Vision'' he found a threatening and sinister incident that he put to his own use.

As for ''All the King's Men,'' he once said: ''Without Huey Long, I wouldn't have written it.''

All these works, sometimes melodramatic in character, served a larger purpose: Mr. Warren's investigation of the nature of honor and justice, of truth and freedom, responsibility and guilt. But because these inquiries impeded the flow of the story, some readers were critical of the ''underdone philosophizing'' that they felt marred his books. 'Miraculous' Rhetoric

Even those who admired him complained of the obduracy of his style. Reviewing ''Brother to Dragons,'' Randall Jarrell wrote that Mr. Warren's ''florid, massive, rather oratorical rhetoric is sometimes miraculous, often effective and sometimes too noticeable to bear.''

Arthur Mizener praised him for bringing to the telling of a story ''the most penetrating and most beautifully disciplined historical imagination we have.'' But in reviewing ''Band of Angels,'' Mr. Mizener wrote that the author's ''brilliant and subtle arguments spread speculations . . . over the imaginative life of 'Band of Angels' like a blight.''

Many critics felt that these characteristics of his work had a more natural place in his poetry. In ''The Ballad of Billie Potts,'' for example, many said that the apostrophes slowed down the story, but that the delays added to the suspense of the poem. Born in Kentucky

Robert Penn Warren was born on April 24, 1905, in Guthrie, a small southern Kentucky town that was part of the Cumberland Valley. It was a beautiful spot, Mr. Warren recalled, ''a country well adapted to the proper pursuit of boyhood.''

He came from a literate family; his grandfather, a Confederate veteran, was fond of quoting from Scott and Byron and such verses as ''The Turk Lay in the Garden Tent.''

As a youth, Mr. Warren went to school in Guthrie and then entered Vanderbilt University. It was the decisive act of his life. There he encountered Ransom, Tate, Donald Davidson, Merrill Moore and others - ''poets and arguers,'' he called them - who turned him from the study of engineering to the study of literature. He later did graduate work at the University of California and at Yale, and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

On his return to the United States, Mr. Warren taught for a while at Southwestern College in Memphis and at Vanderbilt, then moved on to Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. Unprovincial Provincial Review

There, in 1935, he founded and edited, with Mr. Brooks and Charles W. Pipkin, The Southern Review, one of the noteworthy and substantive magazines of its time. Though it claimed to express ''the regional and sectional piety'' of the editors, it was far from a provincial effort and was read eagerly throughout the country. The magazine published stories and poems by Eudora Welty, Mary McCarthy, Ford Madox Ford and W.H. Auden, among others. It was disbanded in 1942, after university officials declared the magazine's success should be defined by whether or not it was self-supporting.

The same year, Mr. Warren accepted a professorship at the University of Minnesota. In 1950 he moved to Yale, where he was named professor of playwriting. He left in 1956 to write full time, but returned to Yale as a professor of English in 1961.

Although he never again lived in the South, he remained the essential Southerner, with a keen sense of history and life's webs of tragedy, triumph, upheaval and peace. His attitude toward the region changed over the course of his life. Early in his career he had contributed to ''I'll Take My Stand,'' a volume that opposed the coming of industrialism to the South and argued for an almost antebellum structure of society.

Mr. Warren's essay, ''The Briar Patch,'' defended segregation as the best hope for blacks to have a decent life. Later, Mr. Warren said he had been wrong. ''I remember the jangle and wrangle of writing it, some kind of discomfort, some sense of evasion,'' he said in a 1968 interview.

But in the 1950's and 60's he published two books, ''Segregation'' and ''Who Speaks for the Negro?'' that describe visits he made to the South to interview officials and black leaders about the civil rights movement.

And he acknowledged that he could not really return home again. Fierce Demeanor, Soft Voice

Mr. Warren made his Connecticut home in a pair of converted barns surrounded by fields he loved to walk. He and his wife, the writer Eleanor Clark, worked from 9 A.M. to 2 P.M. every day in their studies.

To his friends he was ''Red,'' from the color of his hair. He was a burly man with a face that seemed carved from stone. It was said he looked like a man who was about to throw you off his land. But his voice, soft with pronounced Southern intonation, belied his fierce demeanor.

As the years passed, Mr. Warren kept on writing. A collection, ''New and Selected Poetry,'' came out in 1985. New work took up roughly one-fourth of the book's 322 pages, and won particular praise from William H. Pritchard of Amherst College, who wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Mr. Warren was ''no one-note dweller on remembrance.''

Professor Pritchard wrote that his favorite poem in all of Mr. Warren's oeuvre was one of the new ones, ''After the Dinner Party,'' about a couple tarrying at the dinner table after the guests have gone, drinking the last of the wine and holding hands. It ends with these lines: The last log is black, white ash beneath displays No last glow. You snuff candles. Soon the old stairs Will creak with your grave and synchronized tread as each mounts To a briefness of light, then true weight of darkness, and then That heart-dimness in which neither joy nor sorrow counts. Even so, one hand gropes out for another, again.

Mr. Warren's first marriage, to Emma Brescia, ended in divorce.

He is survived by his wife; a sister, Mary Barber of Maysville, Ky.; a daughter, Rosanna Scully of Needham, Mass.; a son, Gabriel, of Washington County, R.I., and three grandchildren.