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 the war that, in retrospect, defined the United States as a singular nation.

Here is how Benet describes the titular character, awaiting execution for treason 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...
That force exists and moves.
                            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."