“True Love” by Robert Penn Warren first appeared in his collection entitled Altitudes and Extensions: 1980-1984, which comprises the new poems in New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985. Altitudes and Extensions was the last collection of poetry Warren published during his life. It contains many reflections on the past, the working of time, and the inevitability of death. This poem recounts the memory of a childhood or adolescent infatuation, which includes some narrative of the life of the young woman (never named) who is the object of this infatuation.

Warren’s later poetry defies easy categorization. While by this stage he has moved on from the High Modernist and highly formalistic verse that marked his early poetic career, his work nevertheless stands apart from the various schools and movements that characterize the Postmodern poetry of the second half of the 20th century. Nevertheless, this later poetry is contemporary in form as well as content.

“True Love,” as its title suggests, is a love poem, and for that utilizes some expected conventions of love poetry, such as the hyperbolic praise of the object of the love and the self-abasement of the loving poet. However, this poem also relates the struggle that erupts in the mind and heart of the lover-poet because romantic love exists in a real world: an imperfect world filled with imperfect people. The poem is thus a bittersweet homage to the powers of love and memory as well as a sober reminder of the harsh realities of life.

Poet Biography

Robert Penn Warren was born in 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky. At age 16 he entered Vanderbilt University where he became a student of the accomplished poet and critic John Crowe Ransom. With Ransom and others at Vanderbilt, such as Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Andrew Lytle, Warren became associated with the Fugitives, a group of writers sometimes credited with initiating a renaissance of Southern literature. Together they published a short-lived (1922-1925) but influential literary journal, The Fugitive. Warren and some of these writers were of the 12, known as the Southern Agrarians, who published a collection of essays titled I’ll Take My Stand (1930). These essays advocate for the South to continue its Agrarian traditions in resisting the encroachment of Northern industrialism. Warren’s contribution to the volume, “The Briar Patch,” deals with the issue of race and defends the policy of separate but equal in race relations. Warren later repudiated the argument.

Warren went on to graduate studies at the University of California, Yale University, and New College at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He maintained an active academic career, serving at Southwestern College, Louisiana State University, the University of Minnesota, and Yale University. While at LSU, with Cleanth Brooks and Charles W. Pipkin he cofounded The Southern Review, a prestigious literary journal to this day. Brooks and Warren collaborated on three influential textbooks: Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), and Modern Rhetoric (1949). These first two established Warren as an advocate for New Criticism, a critical approach that emphasizes meticulous reading of the text itself and puts little regard on biographical or historical context.

Despite these accomplishments, Warren is best known as a novelist and poet. During his lifetime, he published 17 volumes of poetry and 10 novels; his collected poems (edited by John Burt) were published posthumously in 1998. His third novel, All the King’s Men (1946) won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction; its film adaptation (1949) won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Two of his poetry collections, Promises: Poems 1954-1956 (1957) and Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978 won Pulitzer Prizes for that category. In addition to poetry and fiction, Warren published three biographies, three children’s books, two studies of race relations, a study of Theodore Dreiser, a study of the American Civil War, a collection of short stories, and a collection of essays.

Along with his Pulitzer Prizes, Warren won many other accolades, which are too numerous to detail here. Of note, however, are the following: Library of Congress Chair of Poetry (1944-1945), the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1967), the Third Annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (1974), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1980), the MacArthur Prize Fellowship (1981), and he was named the first Poet Laureate of the United States (1986). He died in 1989.

Poem Text

Warren, Robert Penn. “True Love.” 1985. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

The heart “utters words meaningless” (Lines 1-2). The speaker harkens back to an earlier age to describe himself at the age of 10 as “skinny, red-headed, // Freckled” (Lines 3-4). This 10-year-old boy is watching a young woman sitting in a car parked in front of the drugstore; she is drinking from a straw. She is accompanied by a young man who wears a necktie and drives a car. Her beauty “stops [the speaker’s] heart” (Line 8). The boy continues to gaze at the young woman but hopes that she won’t notice him. He marvels at her beauty as compared to himself: “How could I exist in the same world with that brightness?” (Line 13).

The speaker provides observations about the young woman’s family life. He first reveals that her bothers are ne’er-do-wells, saying, “Her grown brothers walked with the bent-knee / Swagger of horsemen. They were slick-faced. / Told jokes in the barbershop. Did no work” (Lines 16-18). Her father has an alcohol use disorder and has isolated himself “on the third floor / Of the big white farmhouse under the maples for twenty-five years” (Lines 20-21). Her mother is religious, “a good, Christian woman, [who] prayed” (Line 24).

The young woman eventually gets married. The father attends “wearing / An old tail coat, the pleated shirt yellowing” (Lines 25-26). The boy, feeling as if he might cry, witnesses the elegant ceremony, saying, “I saw the wedding. There were / Engraved invitations, it was so fashionable” (Lines 27-28). His thoughts then fall upon the young woman on her wedding night, contemplating on what her reaction would be to her presumably first sexual encounter: “I lay in bed that night / And wondered if she would cry when something was done to her” (Lines 29-30).

After the wedding, the young woman does not return home, and her family “[s]ort of drift[s] off” (Line 33) after their home is repossessed. In the final lines of the poem, the speaker is confident that the young woman has nevertheless come to live in comfort: “But I know she is beautiful forever, and lives / In a beautiful house, far away” (Lines 34-35). Then, the speaker ends with a final expression of wonder and awe for the young woman, saying, “She called my name once. I didn’t even know she knew it” (Line 36).