THE FIVE SEASONS—Phelps Putnam—Scribner ($2).
Since the days of Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705) many a poet hasaspired to write the American epic. Latest to throw his black Mexicanhat into the ring is Phelps Putnam, whose hero, Bill Williams, iswandering through America, which he frankly characterizes as Hell. ToBill’s amours and rowdy friends, a small number of readers were firstintroduced when Poet Putnam’s Trine appeared in 1927. In The FiveSeasons, Bill no longer is a mere collection of verse, but emerges asan American character to whom Epicist Putnam has dedicated his life.
Hero Bill discovers that America is not a young land, but an old womanwhom the early settlers violated in her prime:
Me, a matronly woman, with the Sim my paramour,
Laden and satisfied, with clear streams cooling my flesh.
I had given suck to races, wonders, and gods. . . .
The unholy horde came from the northern lands,
And the acne slowly destroyed my loveliness,
I grew decrepit and my teeth fell. . . .
One of Bill’s, chief difficulties is that women constantly fall in lovewith him:
There was one who cherished Bill,
Thinking it was a glory in his head
And not a fault which kept him wandering.
And another difficulty was that Bill himself cherished many women:
In Springfield, Massachusetts, I devoured
The mystic, the improbable, the
Rose. . . .
I had my banquet by the beams
Of jour electric stars that shone
Weakly into my room.
But in the fire of such experiences, in his unhappy love for theDaughters of the Sun—
I understand
That yon are sad about a girl.
Good God, forget it, Bill.
Would you pass all your time in slavery
To buttocks and anemia?
Poet Putnam closes his rugged, colorful work with a Hymn to Chance:
The tiny names of gods will not serve us
now. . . .
We travel in the belly of the wind;
It is you, Lord, who will make us lame
or swift.
The Author, Howard Phelps Putnam, 37, Yaleman, was brought up on a farmin Harvard, near Boston. Like his hero Bill, he has wandered. He firstbecame known to literary critics for his “Ballad of a Strange Thing,”which appeared in the American Caravan in 1927. After the publicationof Trine in 1927 Epicist Putnam went West, lived in Santa Fe, becameclosely associated with New Mexico’s connoisseur Senator BronsonCutting. He now lives in Sandy Springs, Md., is interested insenatorial politics, is engaged in composing some of the majornarrative portions of his poem.