SVB -- Ballads & Poems

"I've been thinking over your suggestion of either 'American Ballads and Poems' or 'American Names' ..., and hope you won't think me pigheaded for not wanting to use the word American with this particular book ... too many Greek girls and knights. Sorry."

to Maule, 0 29 '30

Ballads & Poems

L. always fascinated by American names in firm's mail order catalogues, would relay them to SVB. Rosemary claims L. was thus the inspiration for the SVB poem, "American Names."

Longwell to CAF, 7/14/54

also, FPA was dilating this in his column -- L. once wrote a rejected short story using only American names.

SVB -- Ballads & Poems (critics)

"Any one failing to buy it will be missing one of the finest works to appear in years."

rev., Apr 15 '31

"The long-awaited collected volume of the poetry of Stephen Vincent Benet is now out."

Outlook, Apr 15 '31

" ... in pruning it down to the lowest limits
he has made a notable book."

rev., Apr 15 '31

27. vol. 40, p. 686, *Some Outstanding New Books* by Yale Men,
review of *Ballads and Poems*, (picture of Benet). Mar 20, 1981

*Ballads and Poems*, etc.....

Benet has always been fond of names, from his Yale Record
days when he wrote of the mystery of Mignon, who had a filet
named for her. And now in this most recent volume, a collection
for the most part of earlier verse now out of print, he revives
his old love. The first section is called "American Names;"
from the initial poem so called, the first line of which states
frankly: "I have fallen in love with American names." Medicine
Hat, Deadwood, Lost Mule Flat, Skunktown Plain, Painted Post,
Natucket Light, and Wounded Knee are some of his favorites.
Again, on page 96, he resumes the theme in a lyric bit entitled,
"Nomenclature," one of a series dedicated to Rosemary, "my
fair lady," certainly doubly fair because of her lilting appell-
ation. Once more we see the name-complex in a charming sonnet
on Connecticut, whose frozen winter wastes he hates "as a
bastard hates her name." Yet he must

".... go back and hunt among your snow something I lost there,
much too long ago." What was it? The careless lyricism of under
graduate days? If so, it has been recaptured in this volume,
whose subjects are for the most part characteristic of the
beginning of wisdom--love and death. They are dainty bits, with
a youthful sparkle. And who, called dactyllically S.W.B., could
fail to be name-conscious?

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And I would not move or speak for the sear or the sky
Or the flame-bright wings of the miraculous Dove!

In the time of turnk tortured and weary verse writers and of
madly egocentric poetical performers, Mr. Benet is a relief; he
tells us good stories and he sings us gay songs. His is a banjo
rhythm at times, at times that of a guitar - pleasant music in the
darkness. Despite the evident desire on his part to discuss life
a little more seriously -

March 1931

Anonymous, "New Editions and Series" *Booklist* XXVII : 321

review of "Ballads and Poems"

Benet, Stephen Vincent. Ballads and poems. 1915-1930. Garden City, New York. Doubleday, Doran, 1931.221 p. $2.50.

The author states that "This book is, in the main, a selection from three earlier books of verse, all now out of print. Some new poems have been added and certain old ones altered, though not materially. . . . *The Island and the Fire* was read, as the Phi Beta Kappa poem, before the Harvard chapter, June, 1930." - *Note*.

*811.5

31 - 2655/2

February 21, 1931

Howard Mumford Jones, "Ballads and Poems," Saturday Review of Literature 7:611.

In a world given to poetry of thought and snestion, Stephen Vincent Benet has remained faithful to the poetry of action, the Scott of our time, whose "John Brown's Body" has been like "marmion" an instant and well-deserved success. But if Benet has the narrative energy of Scott, his is a livlier and more dazzling world: one section of the present volume is called "The Kingdom of the Mad," which Scott would not have dreamed of; and if he has the exuberance, the vitality the clean, boyish vigor of the great wizard, there is much more of a sense of escapade in the younger poet, who delights in turning the world upside down by the simple process of looking at it through his legs.

Soup should be heralded with a mellow horn,
he wries, adding

Over the slad let the woodwinds moan,
and so on through an ingenious sonnet which jumbles food and
instrumentation together, only to conclude with a disillusioning crash:

Such are my thoughts as -clang! crash! bang! - I brood

And gorge the sticky mess these fools call food!

I do not cite these lines as great poetry, or even as good poetry,
but as representing an important element in Benet's view of the world.
For if Scott, to continue with the parallel, was mostly content with
a world which produced noble creatures like Roderick Dhu and Fair
Ellen, Benet, despite the charming group of poems addressed to
Rosemary, is discontented with the world because it does not produce
noble creatures like the unicorn and Helen of Troy. He writes with
great truth:

My mind's a xam map. A mad sea-captain drew it
Under a flowing moon until he knew it;
Winds with brass trumpets, puffy-cheeked as jugs,
And states bright-patterned like Arabian rugs.
"Here there be tygers." " Here we buried Jim."

Finding no such maps in a modern atlas, the poet has two resources: he creates in his narrative verse ("The Hemp," a tale of piracy, is an excellent example) a world in which such a map comes to life; or, as in the section of the present volume called "Skyscraper House," he seeks by an acute awareness of the present to translate its implied values back into such a world. For example, in a poem "Lunch-Time Along Broadway," the New York crowds are pictured as a primeval beast which "snuffles its way" "pokes its muzzle," "roots into subterranean holes," and performs other actions eminently satisfactory to the amused and boyish imagination of the poet. For, in a highly flattering sense, Benet has the imagination of a boy; and Stevenson's "A Gossip on Romance" is an acute commentary on his poetry.

This sense of the irreconcilability of the world of romance and
the world of the present explains, I think, why so many of the poems
in the present collection open according to a formula. The formula
is a brief sketch of a present situation; one element in that situation
suggests something imaginative, unreal, or dramatic, and so on.

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which is the real poem; and the piece draws to a conclusion with a
Heinesque return to the present -- the dream is recognized as
traumatic, and we return upon the workaday world with an increased
sense of dissatisfaction. Those poems which most satisfactorily present
the real world, it is significant, are poems of lowe and honor; and
conversely, the most satisfactory narratives in the collection are
those for which, as in "king David", there is no need of a spring-
board of present situation from which to leap into the past.

Mr. Benet's straight line narratives in this collection seem to me to be the most satisfactory parts of his collection. He tells a story swiftly, with a clean economy of line, and a right sense of the dramatic, and melodramatic values. The two characteristic weaknesses in his narratives scarcely impede its flow, though they break the concentration of the reader. One is a restlessness which leads him to a constant change of verse pattern (seen most characteristically in the two "Helen" poems); and the other is an eager desire to make comparisons. In this volume everything is something else. I open at random and read:

The wind sniffed like ahappy cat
As scuttling beetle-people,
The sunshine would have roused a flat
To try and be a steeple.

The first comparison is happy and unexceptionable; the second is
unnecessary and uncouth. When in the next stanza the world becomes
a coon that has climbed a branch, and the poet, Davy Crockett; and
in the third Time is at first a miser and then a diamond-maker, one's
attention is drawn away from the central unity of impression to
admire the virtuosity of the poet.

Such writing springs from sheer exuberance, or seems to; and there
is an infectious gayety even in Benet's macabre poems which is wholly
charming. This, he seems to sya, is what I can do in the worm-and-
coffin line, and I think it's rahter jolly. I do not say this to
disparage the poet, for it is a quality wholly admirable in itself,
especially when so many modernistic poets seem to write with such
mental anguish that the pain communicated to the reader; but it is
a quality which perpetually prevents Benet from really reaching tragedy.
His grim situations are dramatic, but they are not passionate; his
pathos is genuine, but it is not profund. The most readable of
poets, he inevitably suffers from his constant delight in the fun
and pleasure of poetry. But it is a comment on modern verse that one
feels apologetic about calling attention to the sunniness which radiates
from this volume, as if the sun and wind were weaknesses, and a
pirate something to be ashamed of. Not only has Benet nothing to
be ashamed of, it is a high tribute to his independence that he
continues to prefer pirates.

February 11, 1931

"Ballads and Poems," by Robeson Bailey, *Nation*, a review, CXXXII:160

Stephen Benet has collected his verses of the past fifteen years and presented them in a single volume which indicates clearly that his is a talent for light verse in particular, for fantasy, gaiety, and facile lyricism. His later attempts at serious poetry are less successful than, for example, the delightful Rosemary poems of several years ago. When he would be serious, this poet is likely to show his worst faults: his overelaborate and at times absurd imageyy his too great agility in rhymes, his general superficiality of conception. But none of these faults mar seriously his light verse. And although he has not the intellectual wit or fine craftsmanship of the English light-verse writer Q (Quiller-Couch), he is probably one of the most graceful of the American ballad and parody writers.

January 12, 1931

Anonymous, "Balladeer" *Time*, XVII, 47.

"Ballads and Poems" - Stephen Vincent Benet - Doubleday, Doran.

Few U.S. poets become best sellers, 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 the 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 sea-gull's 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

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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 xxx 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*.

"Round about Parnassus" by William Rose Benet
*Saturday Review of Literature* VII, December 27, 1930, 491

it is probably not my province to say one single word about
"Ballads and Poems, 1915-1930" by Stephen Vincent Benet.
Therefore as I am usually leaving the undone things I ought to
have done and doing the things I ought not to have done, and there
is in me comparatively little health, I shall say that single
word. I shall naturally, not review the book. It will be viewed
with entire detachment by another and far better critic. But
having had the opportunity for some years to observe at close
range the development of a rootedly American poet, a little of
the fruit of this observation may be of some interest to my
readers.

From a rather early age there was a distinct tendency in
the author of "John Brown's Body" to grit his teeth. In
human relationships both mild and amiable, poetry was yet from
the first a bright valour in his blood. It was a direct
inheritance from a father whose love of the ringing line was
well-known to the evening circle of a certain home. "I sprang
to the saddle, and Joris, he--" "As I ride, As I ride,"

> O brave heart and loyal!
> Let all your colors dip;--
> Mourn him, proud ship!
> From mian deck to royal--
> This is the Captain Loredan
> And we are all his men!

"--Scattered tags that give the influence. And with this love
of the noble strain was combined surely one of the most amazing
senses of humor that ever added brilliance to a bitingly mature
intelligence. Like father, like son."

There came, naturally enough, a William Morris period. For

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a certain type of spirited young mind there will always be,
thank God, a William Morris period. Here, in the book before
us, it can be observed in "Three Days' Ride", from the under-
graduate days of the poet. And if one well remembers how, when
the mist rolling over the fen, Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast
was slain, one can trace the thread in:

Poisen the steel of the plunging dart,
Holloa your hounds to their station!
I march to my ruin with such a heart
As a king to his coronation.

This was good gallantry, nor was it a pose. For William
Butler Yeats himself has said of the poetry of youth:

When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs;

No, here were " the right twigs for an eagle's nest," and
here the sinew without parade of muscularity, mised with that
humor of his father's, that could deftly draw the comparison
of the Trapeze Herformer in the sonnet of like name. In two
other creations this poet fixed in the printed word the chivalric
honor of youth; once in the prose which contains a beautiful
lyric, --namely the episode of young love occuring in his first
novel, "The Beginning of Wisdom," once in the poem, "Flood-Tide."
In my own opinion this was an achievement: the capturing of so
delicately iridescent and evanescent a thing as that young love
which, somehow, in its very vagueness and glamor, seems possessed
essential
of so much/tragedy than the loves of the mature. By those
familiar with my brother's prose the imagined episode of Milly
will always be remembered, and in his poetry the young people
"huddled up in the launch like a sleepy parcel of birds", as
they drift through the light of a moon never to rise again.
Now he says, in a changed postscript to that poem:

-3-

After the thirteenth year, the water runs as before,
The gemmed wave in the water, the starlight on the gem,
All but the crew who sailed there, and they return no more,
But the words are as they were written. I cannot alter them.

in the sonnets to Donald Malcolm Campbell "The Golden Corpse,"
a final tribute is paid to that strange era. And this series
of sonnets and two single poems illustrate a distinct change
coming over the spirit of the dream. Before that time there
were many, "Charlots and Horsemen," (one of his sectional sub-
titles for this book). Now the characteristically American
begins to be the poet's chief concern, in "The Ballad of
William Sycamore" and "The Mountain Whippoorwill." These, I
feel, both to be logical preludes to "John Brown's Body", even
as I feel "The Golden Corpse" to point not indirectly to the
"Invocation" to "John Brown." The affection for his own soil,
which the years have only served to intensify, is already
evinced. For in these sonnets preceding the sonnets of the
"Invocation" he offers "to the shadow in the air"

Only a branch of maple, gathered high
When the crisp air first tastes of applejack,
And the blue smokes of Autumn stain the sky.

There had already been Paris and Romance, as there was to
be Paris again. There had been the songs of the section,
"My Fair Lady," wherein the blood that" can be got from nowhere
but the heart" is quicksilvered by adoration into the production
of a parade of bright toys:

They'll give you a curled tuba, tall as Rumor,
They'll sit you on a puff of Autumn cloud,
Glided-fantastic as your scorn and humor
And let you blow that tuba much too loud!

There has always been in my brother's work delight in
legend, delight in the tapestry, though his manner of presentation
seems to me to take from it any taint of the mustiness of
libraries. In fact in his boyhood he was the kind of child

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who vividly "lives" the characters in the books he reads;
he comes naturally by the faculty for vivid recreation of the
past. So, the Ironic Spirit descended upon him, he suddenly
launched his best single ballad, "King David." Nor was this
that spirit's first visitation. Let me point chiefly to an
early opinion of "The General Public" as expressed in a poem
concerning Shelley's school-days.

Highly talented youth is spendthrift. A faculty for writing
must be managed with a taut rein. My brother depended upon his
typewriter for a living and there came a certain fairly straitened
season during which the short stories he was writing failed
more and more to satisfy him, though they happened to pay the
rent. The opportunity to go to Paris again, this time on a
fellowship, was a welcome turn of fortune. Here was a
chance to write exactly what he pleased. And he knew now what
he wished to write. He wished to concentrate all his powers on
a longer work which would either be better poetry then he had
ever written, or a failure. The point was to make use of all
the skill he had learned, to apply the day-after-day concentration
he had by now schooled himself to give his work. That he
suddenly knew his theme was to be the American Civil War did not
seem at all extraordinary to his immediate family. Books in
his father's library, the "Battles and Lealers", old army
records, had from the time he was very young helped to ruin his
eyesight quite as much as Ferrero on the Roman emperors. Indeed,
I recall many a conversation between a spectacled small boy
and an older man who always reminded one rather of a rapier, the
latter biting his moustache and drawling his argument with
twinkling eyes. Both draped themselves quaintly over their
respective chairs; the tendency on the part of the males of

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that family being never to sit straight in a chair if one
could possibly avoid it. They may have been discussing the
wilderness or Anteitam. It was in the midst of my brother's
most pronounced pro-Southern period, which had followed on a
period of polemic socialism during which time he would receive
letters from his parent addressing his as "Dear Comrade..."

Well, the work was "determined, dared and done." It will
stand. The author of it and "Ballads and Poems" is not an
impeccable writer. But though some years have passed since
first he began it, poetry is still to him the same bright valour
in the blood. He writes it to please himself according to the
demands of his own temperament. His mind is vigorous and
intensely alive. Criticism he takes with a drawl and a twinkle.

"The Island and the Fire" has been his longest poem since
"John Brown." It ends the present volume. It renews his
dedication to the American soil. Which most certainly does not
mean that he will write hereafter of nothing but America. The
wind of the spirit bloweth where it listeth. But this poet
still likes to draw his similitudes from the richness of his
own country's past.

A good poet; a man of strong affections; a good man at a
venture!

Boston Transcript, January 24, 1931 Page 2.

Stephen Benet's Poems
Rev. of Ballads and Poems

The majority of the poems included in this volume were selected by Mr. Benet from three earlier books now out of print. There is also a section of new poems appearing for the first time between covers. Among these and concluding all is "The Island and the Fire" read last June before the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a priceless tapestry of poems! Woven of ballads and portrait verse, lyric, sonnet, song and story, they are irredescent with the scarlet of triumph, the gray of disillusion, the blue of hope, the gold of true love, the silver-whiteness of friendship. The pictures of this tapestry range through earth and sea and sky, and their figures from the "Sea-Hawks" of the ballads to that unknown force brooding above all life, whose names vary -- to us God.

In each of the eight divisions are poems of haunting beauty. Of all modern major poets, perhaps Mr. Benet indisputably proves that melody accentuates rather than lessens the strength of poetry. Even his stately sonnets have the surge of singing beneath their rigidly prescribed form.

Bernice Kenyon, "The New Poetry", *Outlook* CLVII, 536

April 15, 1931 rev. of *Ballads and Poems*

(part of a series of reviews)

The long-awaited collected volume of the poetry of Stephen Vincent Benet is now out. It is called *Ballads and Poems* (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50) and whoever reads it will know that any country capable of producing such a volume is in a healthy state, so far as its poetry is concerned. This shorter work of the author of *John Brown's Body*, some of it new, some selected from earlier publications of the last fifteen years, is thoroughly American, dramatic, imaginative, and superbly done. Mr. Benet has included only the very finest of his work, and in *doxx* so doing has left out much that might safely have been included; but in pruning it down to the lowest limits he has made a notable book. Any one failing to buy it will be missing one of the finest works to appear in years.