A central figure in twentieth-century American literature, Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was appointed by the Library of Congress as the first Poet Laureate of the United States in 1985. Although better known for his fiction, especially his novel All the King's Men, it is mainly his poetry -- spanning sixty years, fifteen volumes of verse, and a wide range of styles -- that reveals Warren to be one of this nation's foremost men of letters.T. S. Eliot said, "We must know all of Shakespeare's work in order to know any of it". Something similar may be said of the poetry of Warren. In this indispensable volume, John Butt, Warren's literary executor, has assembled every poem Warren ever published (with the exception of Brother to Dragons, the later version of which is featured on page 30 of this catalog), including the many poems he published in The Fugitive and other magazines, as well as those that appeared in his small press works and broadsides. Butt has also exhaustively collated all of the published versions of Warren's poems -- which, in some cases, appeared as many as six different times with substantive revisions in every line -- as well as his typescripts and proofs. And since Warren never seemed to have reread any of his books without a pencil in his hand, Burt has referred to Warren's personal library copies and also the ones he gave Stuart Wright. This comprehensive edition also contains textual notes, lists of emendations, and explanatory notes.