Rumor Verified: POEMS

By Robert Penn Warren

Book Overview

Dust jacket design by Carole Lowenstein. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039474960X
• ISBN13: 9780394749600
• Release Date: August 1981
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 97 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

"a world ablaze but not consumed"

Rumor Verified is a late collection of Warren's poetry, released two years after Now and Then-- one of his Pulitzer-prize winning books. The poems illustrate much of his skill as a poet and are infused with the bittersweet nostalgia of a man looking back at his life. Poems like "Blessed Accident" and "Questions You Must Learn to Live Past" will be carried with me long after the book has been put away. The book is structured into eight sections, with chapter headings: Prologue; Paradox of Time; Events; A Point North; If This Is the Way It Is; But Also; Fear and Trembling; and Coda. Rumor Verified does not seem to be one of the better known works by Warren. This is, I think, a shame. I would recommend it for people who admire his other poetry or for people who have come to his work through his prose and are looking for a good place to begin with the rest of his work.

Rumor Verified by Robert Penn Warren

I seldom read poetry, but years ago a phrase from Robert Penn Warren's Poem "Fear and Trembling" stuck in my mind: "Us who now know that only at the death of ambition does the deep energy crack crust, spurt forth and leap from grottoes dark and from the caverned enchainment." A friend told me I could find the whole poem in "Rumor Verified" and I am thrilled with the whole book. Here's another favorite part from "Small Eternity": "That is the sound Reality makes as it gives beneath your metaphysical poundage. Memory dies. Or lIes. Time is a wind that never shifts airt. Pray only that, in the midst of selfishness, some small act of careless kindness, half-unconscious, some unwitting smile or brush of lips. may glow in some other mind's dark that's lost your name, but stumbles upon that momentary eternity.