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John Brown's Body

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During the Pax Romana the emperor Augustus commissioned Vergil to write an epic history of the Romans. The result, of course, was The Aeneid, a stunning blend of epic poetry and historical fiction that some would argue has yet to be topped. John Brown's Body is the closest thing we have to an epic poem "about" America. And while it takes place during the civil war and makes no claim to be an authoritative history, the book is no less impressive as a literary feat. No book in the history of this country has so artfully depicted our nation's great schism.

Written in the 20s, John Brown's Body redefines the word ananchronism. Its contemporaries are The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Professors widely praise these modern works for their groundbreaking aesthetics, and not without justification. However, it's hard to imagine a more daring or daunting task than the writing of John Brown's Body. Never mind the fact that he pulled it off marvelously. Stephen Vincent Benet remains the only writer to have even _attempted_ to write an American epic poem. Stephen Vincent Benet deserves high scores both for degree of difficulty and final product. Yet conventional education regarding 20th century American books never seems to give him these high marks.

Why Benet and his book don't get the recognition they merit is a terrific question. Is his book canonically superior to Gatsby and Their Eyes? No. And on some level, it's difficult to see what someone living in Taiwan could glean from this document of American struggle and triumph. To wit, the book can also be criticized for being slightly skewed toward a Yankee perspective. But as a whole, the book is outright better than a lot of works revered as American classics.

What does better mean? What it should mean. Simply a more impressive work of art. More entertaining. More provactive. More fun to read. More intellectual depth, conveyed subtly and beautifully, embedded skillfully but not invisibly in an absorbing tale. On these counts, John Brown's Body is vastly superior to classics like The Sun Also Rises; The USA series of John Dos Passos; Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis; and certainly Hawthorne's later novels. Yet John Brown's Body continues to get short shrift, to the point where it's well nigh unfindable in many a book store. One can only hope that the critics and canon-makers of later generations restore the book to its proper place, high atop our shining history of American letters.

I have no idea how to write a review of this epic (in the literal sense, not in the nonsensical way _Star Wars_ or _Shogun_ are billed as "epics") of the American Civil War. Vast and intricate, panoramic and intimate, at turns funny, cruel, sentimental, vile and tragic..but always honest, courageous, and unflinching...always spellbinding. There are not many works of poetry I can not read without getting a tear in my eye, but this is one of them. The surrender at Appomattox, the death of Lincoln, and the catalog of the Army of Northern Virginia, ending in its sublime tribute to Robert E. Lee, in particular, choke me up every time I read them.

John Brown's Body will not serve as a history of the Civil War--you need to know the outlines of the history before you dive in--but I know of no where else in literature you can turn to receive a fuller impression of what the period was _about._

This is, in my estimation, the greatest work of poetry ever written by an American. That it goes largely untaught in our schools is a great and inexplicable shame. That any student of the Civil War should be without a copy is simply inexcusable. This book deserves your attention.

When Stephen Vincent Benet finished John Brown's Body in 1928 and the critics awaited its issue, the South was most anxious and skeptical that they would be portrayed honestly. They were and Stephen Benet's masterpiece is America's greatest epic poem and a most unappreciated work of literature. But, I love it and always will love it, because it makes those historic figures of so long ago - come alive. Out of the mist, they ride. Come traveler, pick it up, open its pages and from fish hook Gettysburg to the end, watch them ride and try to understand over all the years what was happening and why they were fighting. It was not all about Slavery!

This book won the Pulitzer Prize in the '40's. It covers the Civil War principally from the perspectives of a young, small town Connecticutt boy and the heir to a Geogia plantation. It begins with a gripping view of events on a slave ship and ends with two crippled young men and the women they love, beginning to rebuild ther lives. Part poetry, part prose, it all sings.

When John Milton sat down in the 16th century and decided that his life's ambition was to become the greatest English poet who ever lived, he realized that obtaining that title required him to write a great epic poem. That work became "Paradise Lost". However, the epic as a form was ot be greatly endangered by a new literary style that was to emerge just a few decades after Milton's death: the novel. With an exquisite, gradual stroke, Daniel Defoe slew the epic as the great long-form narrative. Within a century, the novel had become the engine of high literature, and the epic, along with poetry in general to a great extent, was relegated to a niche (not only that, but trends in poetic form skewed away from the verse styles normally used). By the time American poet Stephen Vincent Benet wrote "John Brown's Body" in the 1920s, the literary world had long since passed the form by. Benet, chronicling the history of the American Civil War, demonstrates why the epic still deserves our attention.

Benet casts a wide net with his storytelling choices, bringing in a mix of historical figures (Lincoln, Davis, and the various generals, Lee most of all) and fictional characters who embody various viewpoints: while the real men all get moments either of description or internal monologue (Lee is described, for example; indeed, Benet makes a point of how there is much about him that we do not understand, especially the unknown nature of his wants), the character arcs and the main plots revolve around the fictional characters. There is Jack Ellyat, a Union soldier; Clay Wingate, a young Southern aristocrat who similarly goes to war; Melora Villas and Sally Dupre, the women they love (Melora being a frontier woman, Sally a Southern belle); various other soldiers and women; and a few slave characters, such as Wingate's loyal servant Cudjo and the runaway slave Spade. On the subject of the blacks, Benet makes a point that his "heart is too white" to really tell their story, but all the same he does a laudable job of recognizing the complexities of the southern slave system, a barbaric cruelty that all the same produced some enduring emotional ties between people that make little sense to us. He also reminds us that the North, while wanting to free the slaves (though this was ultimately up for grabs; Lincoln is given a revealing dialogue to the Almighty about whether or not he should release the Emancipation Proclamation), was not a bastion of racial equality. There is a final scene between a white Pennsylvania veteran and Spade that suggests a grudging briding of worlds through shared war experience.

Benet employs various different verse styles in the course of the poem, from rhyming couplets to ABAB rhymes to free verse without rhyme and limited metre, to prose on a couple of occasions. These shifts allow for rotations between buoyancy and starkness, as suited to individual scenes. Some characters, such as Clay Wingate, consistently employ one sort of poetic form. My two favourite passages in the poem are done in a rhyming style: the wind's prophecy of the thirteen sisters (an allegory of the breakup of the Union) and 'John Brown's Prayer', a brilliant dissection of Brown's conflicted mind.

This is a lengthy read, but very worthwhile; take a look and see how the Greeks' highest poetic form endures.

This book, in my opinion, is probably one of the greatest ever written. It is well laid out, it tells a gripping story that will keep you reading until the last line. "It is here."

The reviews below say it well. I re-read parts of this every few months - not to refresh my knowledge of the civil war, but to re-fresh my awareness of life. This guy helps you SEE the real life going on around you. And his use of words is often just delicious. It is a masterpiece.

While it is a staggering work of American poetry, John Brown's Body should not - and must not - be considered a factual account of the Civil War period. Like most Civil War works published in the 1920s - the period that saw the rise of Jim Crow and the rebirth of the KKK - Benet's "epic" seeks to distract readers from the role slavery played in sparking the war. If we admit that slavery sparked the war, then we admit that blacks were important enough for whites to fight and die for. And in the 1920s, social pressures in the United States were aimed toward disempowering blacks. Proponents of the "Lost Cause" mentality will argue that the Civil War was fought not over slavery, but rather over states' rights. But states' rights to do what? Keep slaves, of course. Appreciate this book for its contribution to poetry. Do no appreciate it for its views on the Civil War.