Books: Balladeer

BALLADS AND POEMS — Stephen Vincent Benet — Double day, Doran ($2.50).

Few U. S. poets have become bestsellers, but Stephen Vincent Benet turned the trick when he wrote John Brown's Body (1928). His is a Muse of a straightforward, dramatic kind, at her best in balladish vein. Into this book Poet Benet has collected his favorites from three earlier, out-of-print volumes and has added some new ones. Only a Benet enthusiast would call this book first-class, but almost anyone would grant its readability, its occasional bursts of exciting phrases.

Primarily a lyrical balladeer, Benet is not content to stick to one verse form, and occasionally makes some happy hits in other directions, as in this epitaph on a Greek Child:

Clay returning to the clay

Zoe lies and never stirs,

Although we sacrificed each day

A little doe with eyes like hers.

And in this description of Lunch-Time Along Broadway: Twelve-thirty bells from a thousand clocks,

the typewriter tacks and stops, Gorged elevators slam and fall through

the floors like water-drops, From offices hung like seagulls' nests on

a cliff the whirlwinds beat, The octopus crowd comes rolling out, his

tentacles crawl for meat.

And 8.30 A. M. on 32nd Street: The wind sniffed like a happy cat At scuttling beetle-people, The sunshine would have roused a flat To try and be a steeple. My breakfast in me warm and staunch, Your letter in my pocket, The world's a coon that's climbed a branch And I am David Crockett.

The Author. Stephen Vincent Benet has no illusions about his own address on Mt. Parnassus. He calls himself a minor poet, says of himself: "I am but a shell,'' to be held against the ear to arouse a "dim, far whisper." Young (32), nearsighted, tall, stoop-shouldered, Poet Benet tried hard to get into the Army during the

War; he bluffed his way through the eyesight test but was found out. He tried advertising and was good at it, like Author Sherwood Anderson, but resigned to write. In 1926 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, went to France and wrote John Brown's Body. Some months ago he followed the well-worn path to Hollywood to write the dialog for Abraham Lincoln (TIME, Sept. 8). Other books: Five Men and Pompey, The Beginning of Wisdom, Spanish Bayonet.