Date of Award

Spring 1970

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

English

Abstract

Robert Penn Warren is a writer obsessed with ideas, to the extent of spending most of his literary life searching for a form that would enable him to express them. Most of his searching has taken place within the framework of the novel form: in fact, within that form he has tried eight different combinations of characters, plot, and point of view in an effort to find an arrangement that would say what he so urgently wanted to say. Judging from the results, however, it was always what he wanted to say that interested him more than the actual mechanics of his art. Throughout his novels, and indeed throughout the entire body of his writing, he subordinates art to life.

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