Books: Nascent Epic?

THE FIVE SEASONS—Phelps Putnam—Scribner ($2).

Since the days of Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705) many a poet has aspired to write the American epic. Latest to throw his black Mexican hat into the ring is Phelps Putnam, whose hero, Bill Williams, is wandering through America, which he frankly characterizes as Hell. To Bill's amours and rowdy friends, a small number of readers were first introduced when Poet Putnam's Trine appeared in 1927. In The Five Seasons, Bill no longer is a mere collection of verse, but emerges as an American character to whom Epicist Putnam has dedicated his life.

Hero Bill discovers that America is not a young land, but an old woman whom 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 love with 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 the Daughters 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 farm in Harvard, near Boston. Like his hero Bill, he has wandered. He first became known to literary critics for his "Ballad of a Strange Thing," which appeared in the American Caravan in 1927. After the publication of Trine in 1927 Epicist Putnam went West, lived in Santa Fe, became closely associated with New Mexico's connoisseur Senator Bronson Cutting. He now lives in Sandy Springs, Md., is interested in senatorial politics, is engaged in composing some of the major narrative portions of his poem.