PROMISES: 1954-1956

Robert Penn Warren was known as a poet long before he was known as a novelist, but this is the first collection of fugitive verse that has been made for many years. He has collected here the poems of the past three years, lyrics for the most part. This reader found them uneven in execution, though throughout there was the singing note of the true lyric poet, and an extraordinarily vivid sense of form, life, color and an ability, in sharply selective choice of words, to share the sensual values. In this he seems more effective than in the emotional content or in any particularly new note of form or versification. A few of these poems have appeared in periodicals.