Robert Penn Warren Birthplace Museum
While attending Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, during the 1920s, Robert Penn Warren joined a group of Southern poets called the Fugitives, which included John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, who strove to preserve formal poetic techniques and rural agrarian social values. Warren received critical acclaim for his writing, eventually becoming the first poet laureate of the United States and winning three Pulitzer prizes, two for poetry and one for fiction, for his novel
All the King’s Men.
Though Warren spent much of his adult life outside of the South living in California, England, Connecticut, and Vermont, where he died in 1989 his language and imagination were deeply rooted in the South. His writing was both expansive and inclusive, and often included reminiscences about his childhood. In his poem “Audubon, he reflects on an early realization of the mysteries of the world. He stands in the dark and hears geese somewhere abov