In the mid-to-late 1950s a number of young American poets published major books that departed aesthetically from the poetry of high modernism. These well-known books—Ginsberg’s Howl (1955), Ashbery’s Some Trees (1957), Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), and Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle (1959)—established the individuality of the poets and marked a significant break with the poetry of the previous few decades. In this period, which saw the rise of beat poetry and confessional poetry as well as the ascendancy of the New York and Black Mountain schools, questions about what poetry was, and about what it could be, incited a goodly amount of debate. And while—amidst debates about “Pale-Faces” and “Redskins,” or about the “Cooked” and the “Raw”—a number of poets from the old guard, such as Eliot, Ransom, and Tate, all but abandoned writing poetry, Ransom’s and Tate’s former Vanderbilt colleague, Robert Penn Warren, published a collection of poems, Promises (1957), his best to date and perhaps the most complete and unified of all his collections. While the books by Lowell, Snodgrass, Ginsberg, and Ashbery are very fine indeed, one might argue that, of all the books published in this period, Promises is the one that best serves young poets of our time as an example of how to negotiate the past and the present, the tradition and the individual. After the publication of his Selected Poems in 1943, in which Warren published “The Ballad of Billie Potts”—a long, brilliant, and sometimes cumbersome poem attempting to blend the frontier dialect of Kentucky, a folk-tale, and lofty philosophical ruminations—he ceased to write poetry for nearly a decade. And then the poems returned, as Warren recounts in the New York Times Book Review:

中文翻译：

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沃伦、艾略特、但丁和传统的承诺

在 1950 年代中后期，许多年轻的美国诗人出版了从美学上脱离高度现代主义诗歌的主要书籍。这些著名的书籍——金斯伯格的《嚎叫》（1955）、阿什伯里的《一些树》（1957）、洛厄尔的生活研究（1959）和斯诺德格拉斯的《心之针》（1959）——确立了诗人的个性，并标志着诗人与诗歌的重大决裂。前几十年。在这一时期，随着节拍诗和忏悔诗的兴起以及纽约和黑山学派的崛起，关于什么是诗歌以及它可能是什么的问题引发了大量的辩论。而与此同时——在关于“苍白的面孔”和“红皮人”，或“熟食”和“生食”的争论中——一些保守派的诗人，比如艾略特、兰塞姆和泰特，几乎都放弃了写作诗歌，Ransom's 和 Tate 的前范德比尔特同事罗伯特·佩恩·沃伦 (Robert Penn Warren) 出版了诗集 Promises (1957)，这是他迄今为止最好的诗集，也许是所有诗集中最完整和统一的。虽然洛厄尔、斯诺德格拉斯、金斯伯格和阿什伯里的书确实非常好，但有人可能会争辩说，在这一时期出版的所有书籍中，《承诺》是最适合我们这个时代的年轻诗人作为如何谈判的一个例子的书过去与现在，传统与个人。在 1943 年他的诗选出版之后，沃伦出版了“比莉波茨的歌谣”——一首冗长、精彩、有时笨重的诗，试图融合肯塔基州的边疆方言、民间故事和崇高的哲学思考——他停止写诗将近十年。然后诗又回来了，