Aspects of Proteus (1949)
Published by Harper & Brothers in 1949, Aspects of Proteus was Hyam Plutzik’s first collection of poetry issued by a major publisher. It includes 55 poems, including the long narrative poem “Death at the Purple Rim” which won the Yale Poetry Prize in 1941.
Aspects of Proteus was one the finalists considered for the Pulitzer Prize in 1950.
Table of Contents:
To the Predynastic Egyptian Who Rests Within the Entrance of The Metropolitan Museum
Mr. Ingleshot of Dereham
The Kain of Ai
Fable
Seeking Always the Word Nearest to Silence
The Strange City
The Begetting of Cain
John Offut
Mr. Pollington Remembers a Poet
Entropy
The Chinaman and The Florentine
Harlowe Young
The Uneasy Hedonist
Commentary
The Women in the City of Towers
Dostoevski, Proust, and the Others
Abner Bellow
Critique
Identity
My Sister
George Hobbs
Patterns of Earth
The Miracle
The Symposium
He Inspects His Armory
Ahitai Ben Neriah
Song
Bomber Base
The Camorra
The Poetic Process
The Bug with a Nose like an Awl
Drinking Song
Whether-Weather
Trade-Talk
Dante in our Time
Argumentum Ad Hominem
Elaboration on a Phrase of Rabelais
Elegy
Those Who Write After Freud
Instructions to an Architect
To Those Who Look Out of the Window
On the Photograph of a Man I Never Saw
Et Après Lui, le Déluge
Exhortation to the Artists
I Have Read in the Book of the Butcher Boy (In Time of War)
Drumming My Window The Rain
The Birth, Life and Death of a Culture Hero
A Letter to Someone at Mt. Palomar
The Event on the Upland
