Why We Still Need the American Epic: From John Brown to the Scrap Yard

The American epic has never looked much like Homer's. 

It has seldom been about kings, rarely about emperors, and almost never about palaces.

Our epics are built beside rivers, railroads, wheat fields, factory whistles, and dirt roads. They are carried by soldiers, blacksmiths, widows, farmers, preachers, immigrants, mechanics, and ordinary people who discover that history has quietly asked something extraordinary of them. 

That is why Stephen Vincent Benét's poem John Brown's Body still matters, nearly a century after its publication. And it is why John Spencer found himself writing Iron & Ashes. 

These two works occupy different centuries. Benét, writing in the early 20th century, stood amid the 19th century Civil War. Spencer, writing in the 21st century, stands beside an aging scrap dealer still plying his trade in the late 20th century on old U.S. Route 40 in Illinois. Yet both are asking remarkably similar questions. 

What becomes of a nation after the noise of history has faded? What remains once the speeches have ended? Who remembers?

Benét answered by gathering the voices of America itself, allowing generals and laborers, abolitionists and slaves, soldiers and statesmen, mothers and children to speak in one vast chorus.  His was not merely a poem about war. It was a poem about the making—and breaking—of a people, and their re-formation into a new kind of nation. 

Iron & Ashes begins where another kind of struggle quietly unfolds. Its battlefield is not Shiloh, Antietam or Gettysburg; it is the scrapyard.  There, iron becomes memory, and rust becomes inheritance. A forgotten bearing or broken plowshare becomes evidence that ordinary labor once held communities together. 

The epic has simply changed its clothing. Where Homer sang of bronze shields, we inherit welding torches. Where Benét heard marching armies, we hear the steady rumble of diesel trucks crossing the Illinois prairie. 

Yet the questions remain the same: Who are we? What have we inherited? What are we willing to carry forward? 

Perhaps every generation must write its own epic—not because history changes, but because memory fades. 

The old roads disappear beneath interstate highways. Family farms become subdivisions. Rail depots become antique malls. Even the objects themselves vanish into the furnace. 

Someone must remember before the last traces are melted away. 

That, I believe, is the work of literature. Not merely to entertain or even to preserve facts, but to recover meaning from the ordinary. 

To look at a weathered wrench, an abandoned forge, a forgotten crossroads, or an old soldier's silence and recognize that these, too, belong within America's great story. 

The epic has never died. It simply moved from the battlefield to the back roads. 

And perhaps that is where it has always belonged.

About This Essay 

This essay also serves as the basis for a Monroe St. Press lecture and discussion program presented to libraries, historical societies, museums, civic organizations, and book clubs. The program explores the American epic tradition through the lens of Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body, John Spencer's Iron & Ashes, and the enduring relationship between literature, history, and place. 

For speaking engagements or program information, please contact Monroe St. Press via email at elaine@monroestpress.com

Coming soon: John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benet

 

 

A work that Monroe St. Press will soon be adding to its lineup of classic literary reprints is the epic poem John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benet, published in 1928.

This book-length epic poem, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1929, recounts the history of the American Civil War in a way that official records, personal memoirs, historical treatises and textbooks cannot capture. 

Beginning with the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry by abolitionist John Brown, and ending with the surrender of the Confederates at Appomattox and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, John Brown's Body describes in Homeric-style verse the lives of major historical figures, ordinary soldiers, civilians and enslaved persons caught up in a war that defined the United States as a singular nation.

Here is how Benet describes the titular character, awaiting execution after the failed raid:

Sometimes there comes a crack in Time itself.
Sometimes the earth is torn by something blind.
Sometimes an image that has stood so long
It seems implanted as the polar star
Is moved against an unfathomed force
That suddenly will not have it any more....
                            And when it moves
It will employ a hard and actual stone
To batter into bits an actual wall
And change the actual scheme of things.
                                       John Brown
Was such a stone--unreasoning as the stone,
Destructive as the stone, and, if you like,
Heroic and devoted as such a stone.
He had no gift for life, no gift to bring
Life but his body and a cutting edge,
But he knew how to die.
                       And yardstick law
Gave him six weeks to burn that hoarded knowledge
In one swift fire whose sparks fell like live coals
On every State in the Union.

Benet introduces Abraham Lincoln in this manner: 

Lincoln, six feet one in his stocking feet,
The lank man, knotty and tough as a hickory rail,
Whose hands were always too big for white-kid gloves,
Whose wit was a coonskin sack of dry, tall tales,
Whose weathered face was homely as a plowed field--
Abraham Lincoln, who padded up and down
The sacred White House in nightshirt and carpet-slippers,
And yet could strike young hero-worshipping Hay
As dignified past any neat, balanced, fine
Plutarchan sentences carved in a Latin bronze;
The low clown out of the prairies, the ape-buffoon,
The small-town lawyer, the crude small-time politician,
State-character but comparative failure at forty
In spite of ambition enough for twenty Caesars,
Honesty rare as a man without self-pity,
Kindness as large and plain as a prairie wind,
And a self-confidence like an iron bar....

John Brown's Body established Benet, born in Pennsylvania in 1898, as a promising 20th-century American author. He was also known for his short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936), which he adapted as a stage play, an opera and a film screenplay. At the time of his death in 1943, Benet was working on another narrative poem, Western Star, recounting the settlement of the United States; this work, although unfinished, received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1944.

Fellow poet Leonard Bacon, in a tribute to Benet after his death, described John Brown's Body thus: 

"Histories of the Civil War we have had ad nauseam. And they are no 'jewels five words long' either! But John Brown's Body is nearer than history is apt to get to that veracity which is beyond time.... A hundred passages in John Brown's Body light up the surface of events, dulled by the ceaseless wash of uninspired repetition, as ultraviolet light brings out unfamiliar flame from a weathered quartz pebble... John Brown, Lincoln, Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Grant each speaks in his proper idiom. Touched by the magic hand of chance they become living men, and no longer steel engravings static in half-forgotten histories."