Promises: Poems, 1954-1956

Robert Penn Warren wrote the poems in Promises in the years after his marriage to the writer Eleanor Clark and the births of their two children, Rosanna and Gabriel, and much of the book grew from a family stay in Italy. The collection falls into two parts. The first is addressed to his infant daughter in the setting of a ruined fortress on the Italian coast; the second, which gives the book its title, turns back to Warren's own Kentucky boyhood and the people he knew there. Moving between a father's tenderness for his young children and memories of the world that shaped him, the poems ask what one generation can promise the next. The book won both the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958.