The Writing of John Brown's Body

Stephen Vincent Benet in Paris

BY CHARLES FENTON

WHEN Stephen Vincent Benét put his wife and daughter on the train for Chicago in April, 1926, for their annual visit to her parents, he had five dollars left in the world after buying the tickets. He lived on the five dollars until a small check arrived from his mother, and then immediately mailed fifteen dollars to his wife, Rosemary. His predicament was not unique; it was not even unusual. It was a commonplace in the practice of American letters.

Five years before, when he was twenty-two, Benét had decided that he would live by and for his writing. He then went on to publish two collections of verse and three novels. He wrote thirty-four short stories — about two hundred and fifty thousand words — and sold all but two of them, for a price that averaged slightly below five hundred dollars per story. Both his verse and his prose won national prizes. Several of his ballads were already semiclassics in the national literature. He had been industrious and productive and his professional growth had been consistent, and yet during the last half of 1925 and the first months of 1926 his situation was fundamentally as insecure and discouraging as that of an unknown and unpublished writer arriving in New York at the age of twenty.

Benét was weary of the pretense of lighthearted modern romance; his mind was on the long poem which he had gloomily told Rosemary it would take him seven years to write; and he began to look around for help. Without much real hope he went down to Pershing Square for a talk with Henry Allen Moe, secretary of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Moe — “a gray-haired Buddha,” Benét said afterward — encouraged him to put in an application for one of the fellowships. If his project was accepted, he would receive a grant of $2500 and go to Paris.

Benét was purposefully vague in the outline of his project. “What I said in my ‘plan,’ ” he explained later, “boiled down to this: that 1 was sick of writing short stories and wanted to do a long poem on some American subject. I told them I had several ideas — including the Civil War one — but couldn’t say which one I’d take.” Benét wrote Wilbur Cross at Yale in September, 1925, asking for a letter of recommendation.

“It would mean a year in which I could write what I want,” Benét explained to the dean, “preferably verse, which has no market value, instead of writing what the magazines want, which, unfortunately, boils the pot, so I should, naturally, like to have a stab at it.”

The dean was pleased to write for him, and so were Edna Millay and John Masefield, and Benét put it out of his mind as much as he could and went back to the he-she stories. Soon, he knew, he would have more than a wife and a two-yearold daughter to care for; a second child was due in the fall.

In April the list of grants was released. Benét was on it. He was jubilant. “It is a good graft,” he told Phelps Putnam, urging him to apply for one. “They are very decent. They give you $2500 in four quarterly installments and tell you to run off and roll your hoop. Then they don’t bother you any more.” Once again he had recovered from seeming disaster. “Don’t worry!” he wrote Rosemary in Chicago. “I enclose herewith 2 checks for $50 apiece and will send them tonight by airplane mail. I phoned Stan [Rinehart] & he very kindly gave me $750 advance on the new Spanish Bayonet royalties, so you see everything is all right. S.B. by the way has sold over 7000 net (excluding the 800 or so review or free copies) so besides this check we will get at least $900 more from it during the year, so that’s nice, isn’t it? The gross sales are over 8000.”

BENÉT and Rosemary stayed up till 2 A.M. the first night at sea. “It seemed so delightful,” Benét wrote his parents, “to be anywhere that was relatively cool.” The foghorn troubled Stephanie for a time; she was reassured when they explained that it was merely the Caronia talking. Alice Lee Myers met them at Le Havre and drove them to Paris. The Myerses had found them a fine apartment on the Rue Jadin. It belonged to Mrs. Jean Lamont, an American friend of both the Myerses and of Stephen’s brother, Bill. Its comfort and the fashionable address, Benét wrote a friend, were beyond their station. “It has a bath and no concierge,” Benét told Shreve Badger, “thus reversing the usual procedure.” Mrs. Lamont had hospitably left champagne and wines for Benét and Rosemary, and books and toys for their daughter.

They were suddenly weary, conscious at last of the insecurity of the past five years. “When we got to this marvelous place,” Benét wrote his brother, “we simply sank into it as into a goosefeather bed and relaxed.” They investigated the new American Hospital, where Rosemary would be delivered some time toward the end of September, and Benét went out there again to see his agent, Carl Brandt, who had had two serious operations for appendicitis in the midst of a business trip to England and the Continent. There was good news: Brandt had sold the English serial rights of Spanish Bayonet for one hundred and fifty pounds. Benét began to think about the long poem. “I have a nice little room on the 6th floor,” he told his brother, “all swept & garnished.”

Their son was born at the American Hospital in Paris on September 28, 1926. He had threatened an earlier arrival, and for a time, Benét wrote his friends, it had seemed he might be named either Caronia or Chemin de fer. He was christened Thomas Carr, however, an amiable and healthy baby whose arrival signaled a kind of recommencement and renewal of their lives. They settled comfortably into the new atmosphere. Stephanie played each day in the nearby sand piles of the Parc Monceau. “She alternates French and English with great unself-consciousness,” Benét told Robert Nathan. He himself resumed the research and planning he had tentatively begun in New York in late June and July.

His sense of the project, like the plan he had submitted for the Guggenheim fellowship, was a broad one. This was characteristic of all his work; even editors had become adjusted to his unwillingness to tie himself down. The quality he most valued in writing was movement; he had learned that for him an outline tended to freeze movement. The general shape of his long poem was nevertheless already clear to him. In the fall of 1926 he visualized twelve parts; in its final form, thirteen months later, it in fact contained ten units, the eight books preceded by the invocation and the slaver prelude.

His conception of the organization was in part a reflection of the long talks he had had with the composer Douglas Moore about the use of American material. He deliberately maintained a loose form, he said later, seeking the structural fluidity of a musical composition. For the moment his working title was Horses of Anger. His mood was one of careful and luxurious exploration. For the first time in six years he was free of deadlines; the Guggenheim check would arrive each quarter.

He read steadily, with the extraordinary speed and retention which had confounded his contemporaries at Yale. Several of them were in Paris during the next year — Tom Chubb, Archibald MacLeish, Donald Ogden Stewart, Douglas Moore — and watching him go through the resources of the American Library reminded them of the wagers they had won by betting classmates that he could read an entire book on the train ride from New Haven to New York. Now, instead of James Branch Cabell and Chesterton, he read the regimental histories he had brought from New York, and he reread for the first time since boyhood the Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. He read diaries and memoirs and autobiographies and all the collections of correspondence.

For the portrait of John Brown he relied particularly on Villard’s biography; for the political and social history of the period he studied Channing and McMaster. He studied all the various lives of Lincoln, especially Sandburg and Hay and Lord Charnwood. He shaped several of his battlefield episodes from Four Brothers in Blue, the participant account of life in the Army of the Potomac. Wherever possible he went back to original sources; all during the rest of his life editors asked him to review new Civil War material, knowing that he had acquired the background of a professional specialist. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison, writing in 1930 to ask permission to quote Irom John Brown’s Body in his own The Growth of the American Republic, told him that the poem s historical narrative was accurate in every detail. Douglas Southall Freeman, reading the poem while he researched the same period for his R. E. Lee, was full of admiration, “He could have fortified even his casual adverbs with footnotes,” said Freeman.

BENÉT found the research a vast pleasure. “Good source books,”he said once, “make the most fascinating sort of reading.” He was working, however, almost ten years in advance of American scholarship. A decade later both the New York publishers and the university presses would be printing immense quantities of Americana of every description. Eventually there would be a Civil War Book Club, and a History Book Club, and magazines devoted exclusively to the national past. In 1926 a student of that past had to track down a large part of the material on his own.

“Why doesn’t somebody write a good life of Lee? ' Benét asked John Farrar in 1927, midway through his own project, “There ought to be a really first-class life of him, neither the biographical novel nor the old kind, and there isn’t. And now is the time when somebody could do it with a little perspective. The writers are being well taken care of, but the Civil War people aren’t, and a lot of them were damn interesting. You could write a superb novel around Forrest — there arc the Grant memoirs but there is no great file of Grant — etc. etc. But Lee is a crying need. And it would take brains, for he’s something of an ungettable man. For that matter, Davis would be quite a stunt to exhume from the legend.”

Benét took notes on the reminiscences of Mrs. Roger A. Pryor and The Diary of a Southern Girl. He used John Beauchamp Jones’s A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, again almost ten years before it was republished in a general edition, and the memoirs of Letitia Macdonald. All his rigorous sense of the importance of accuracy responded to the duties of sound research. “Well, for the record ...”he always prefaced the debate of conversation. Here, too, he was trying to establish the record of conflicting testimony. “It is worthy,” he said once, “to assemble facts, to put truth in the face of legend, to investigate impartially, to throw new light on an old problem.”

He became one of the regulars at the American Library, housed ornately on the Rue de l’Elysée in a former palace of the Papal Nuncio. “He read everything we had on Lincoln,”one of the librarians remembered years later. They recalled his arriving once a week with an armful of books and leaving an hour or two later with an equal load. Prom the New York publishing houses the library received exhibition copies of most of the new books, and these were available for circulation for six weeks before being returned to America. Here benét read Elmer Gantry and The Sun Also Rises, both of which he admired, and Show Boat, and, in french, the novels of Proust, “who is almost ideal for me,”he wrote John Carter, “as he is as long as Trollope and a lot better.” These were evening diversions, however, like the French detective stories and the old Edgar Wallace novels which he trailed through the secondhand bookstalls. His working day was built around the Civil War and its people.

“I wish I had about a million books on the Civil War that aren’t in the American Library,” he wrote his brother, “but then I am having trouble enough with the ones I can use — people lie so, especially when they are writing their reminiscences.”

He envied the writers who worked the same field in later years. “We are getting better and better source books on American history all the time,”he said in 1939, “and we are lucky to have them.”For the moment he did his best to check himself constantly. “I want to be as accurate as possible wherever I can,” he told John Farrar, warning his editor that if the poem were ever finished he would probably be making corrections right up to publication time. He had read all the current historical studies which took their lead from Strachey and Gamaliel Bradford. He respected the research of these two, and of such disciples as Philip Guedalla, but he had little use for the bulk of this new school of history.

“A good many of our recent biographies or semibiographies or biografictions, whatever you choose to call them,” he said in 1932, “have [been] rather like Mark Twain’s reconstruction of the dinosaur, ‘three bones and a dozen barrels of plaster.’ The author might not always take the trouble to find out just what his subject did and when he did it, for that often requires a tiresome amount of research. But, as regards what the subject thought and felt, there the author was not merely all-wise but all-seeing. ... A few footnotes, a dash of Freud, thick paper, a dashing jacket — and Passion on the Wind, or the Life of Chester A. Arthur, was ready for the trade.”

Benét was anxious to avoid any such improvisation in his own portraits. “These little things are hell to check on,” he told Farrar, explaining why this was going to be so long a project, “and I have had a lot of grief trying to do so.”He worked every day, surmounting for the first time his hostility to early rising. When a friend remarked that he kept hours as regular as an office worker, he replied — it was one of the few times he spoke of his writing habits—that a long poem was a 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. proposition. He likened the problems to the composition of a novel.

“When you set out on a long poem,” he said, “it’s not possible to write only when you are feeling fine. You have to write so much every day or you’d never get the thing done. Short poems are a different matter.”

By Christmas he had finished what he still regarded as the first of twelve sections. He rarely mentioned what he was working on during this period unless his friends questioned him persistently. Few of them were particularly enthusiastic about his project. It was not a year in which many of his generation were exploring the American past or approving its present. Most of them sympathized with the waves of anti-Americanism which the French were exhibiting. MacLeish was preoccupied with French poetry. Tom Chubb talked to Benét about the poem in 1927, and later admitted that he tried to dissuade his friend from a Civil War theme; Chubb argued that it was thoroughly unpromising both as to subject and success.

THE days slid by, sponged up by work and reading and the placid delights of a happy marriage and fulfilled parenthood. There were people and scenes to remind the Benéts pleasantly of the gaieties of their courtship and honeymoon in 1921 and 1922, yet the pattern of their lives now was very different from the conventional image of Americans abroad. Alice Lee Myers came in sometimes to sit with the children so they could go out for an evening; all their pleasures were similarly domestic. Their friends were mostly other married couples with young children — the McClures; Charles Child, the artist, and his wife; the Myerses; and the Moores — and McClure later remembered with nostalgia “the quiet evenings together en famille.”

Child once described their circle as composed of the handful of Americans in Paris who were not having marital difficulties. Moore read aloud the comic opera he was writing about contemporary America, with its refrain, “America shall be saved!” They played involved word games and admired one another’s children, and Benét began to put on weight alarmingly because Jeanne, Mrs. Lamont’s cook, did her job so well. “What a contrast,” McClure recalled, “between Steve’s Paris years and those of some other young American writers we knew at that time, notably Fitzgerald and Hemingway.”

Benét was immune to the anti-Americanism of some of the literary expatriates. He refused to be disturbed by the hostility of the French, who were excited alternately by the closing chapters of the Sacco-Vanzetti case and the recall of the war loans. When interviewers asked him later why he had gone to France to write an epic poem about the Civil War, Benet invariably replied, quite truthfully, that it was because living was cheaper there than at home.

Through Brandt they were invited to various literary cocktail parties, but Benét had had his fill in New York. He endured a single of Louis Bromfield’s celebrated luncheons and returned gladly to the Rue Jadin. The stable nature of his and Rosemary’s lives during this period, and the lives of most of their friends in Paris, was a confirmation of his beliefs about the permanence of American values. He had done Montmartre in the fall of 1920, and with immense enjoyment; now he enjoyed other pleasures, all of them of an essentially simple and familiar kind. “It takes more than traveling,” he explained later, “to make a man an expatriate.”

Benét read the expatriate magazines of the period, and he puzzled his way conscientiously through Gertrude Stein. He was linked to the avant-garde currents through his friendships with MacLeish and John Peale Bishop, both of whom he saw regularly. He valued and honored the work that the serious-minded members of that group were doing. So far as his nonliterary creed was concerned, however, his values and aspirations were more homely and in certain respects more durable.

It was an ideal state of mind in which to write a long poem celebrating the solidarity and permanence of the Union. “I hope it has in it,” Benét wrote Farrar in 1927, “some of the landscapes, sights, the sounds of the people which are American. I am tired, not of criticism of America, for no country can be healthy without selfcriticism, but of the small railers, conventional rebels. We also have a heritage — and not all of it wooden money.”

Benét’s passionate feelings about America had been partially concealed from him in New York. They had emerged during occasional periods of well-being, taking the form of the Sycamore and Whippoorwill ballads; then they were cloaked again for long periods by the pressures of Manhattan poverty and the offense of his fiction. In Paris the various stresses were removed. Both his emotional and his intellectual attachments to America were cultivated simultaneously, the one by the separation from his native country and by the version of America which he and his friends were living in Paris, the other by his reading in the national past. “Living abroad,” he said in 1928, “has intensified my Americanism.”

When Ethel Andrews visited them in Paris in the late winter of 1926 she heard Benét speak of these things. “I never realized how strongly I felt about the United States,” he told her, “until now, living so long away from it.”

Benét’s work on the long poem was interrupted briefly by word from Mrs. Lamont that she would need the apartment. They moved during the Christmas holiday to suburban Neuilly. “This apartment is comfortable,” Benéet wrote his brother, “large and quiet and we have taken down the hand-painted oil picture of the assassination of St. Whoozis, and the alabaster bust of an unknown French lady of the presidency of Sadi-Carnot, and the two black memorial urns that erstwhile made the salon so tastefully French. My damn poem is getting ahead,” he added briefly, “though every time I sit down to it I wonder if anyone else will ever be able to read it without falling asleep.” By early March he was typing the third section. “Sometimes I think it is good,” he wrote home, “& sometimes I wonder who will read it but the typesetter—but I shall finish it or explode in loud fragments of Battles & Leaders of the Civil War.”

BY MID-APRIL, still visualizing twelve units, Benét had finished the fourth section. As he retyped it he began to see the final structure more clearly. He moved the invocation from its original setting in the third section and revised it as a separate unit. He retitled the poem John Brown s Body, and now he decided on eight books rather than the dozen sections. He blended the finished groups so that by the late spring of 1927 three of the books were completed. Both his brother and Henry Canby wrote several times that they were anxious to publish any available fragments as soon as possible in the Saturday Review of Literature. Benét was hesitant.

“Some of it could be printed separately, I think,” he wrote Bill at the end of April, “though I don’t know how much — maybe the invocation or some of the John Brown part in particular. But I’m afraid the effect of the thing, if any, is a mass effect.”

In early May he paused again to retype what he had done to date — one hundred and thirtyfive pages— and to catch his breath. “It’s a queer start,” he wrote his brother, “& sometimes I think it will be the most colossal flop since Barlow’s Columbiad.” He mailed them the “Invocation,” however. They used it immediately in a June, 1927, issue, the first public indication of what he had been working on for twelve months.

By then the Benéts had moved to the country for the summer. They rented a house at Bizy, fifty miles from Paris in southern Normandy. There was a tennis court up the hill which Stephen was invited to use, but instead he stayed on his nine-tofive schedule. “I am at present extinguished,” he wrote Robert Nathan, “under the tall foolscap of this long poem.” By the first of July he had finished the sixth book. He told Farrar that it would be completed by August, but cautioned him not to expect the manuscript until fall. “I’ll have a lot of going over it to do,” Benét explained.

Now the mail brought word of the excited reaction to the “Invocation.” There were approvingletters from readers and congratulations from friends and colleagues. A lady who was a friend of John Brown’s grandniece wrote to say how much she was looking forward to the complete poem. “I’m afraid she will not greatly care for what I say about the old man,” Benét told his brother. “He had his points but he was a queer proposition.”

He finished the final book in mid-August and took a week off to visit his brother and Elinor Wylie in England. He returned to Bizy to begin the revisions and continued work on them after they moved back to Neuilly. For the next two months Benét worked over the manuscript without interruption. At the end of that time he told his brother it was finished and apologized for not writing since August. “I was sweating at John Brown’s damn body whenever I had a minute, trying to get it off.” He sent one copy to New York, for Brandt and Farrar, and the carbon to his parents. He asked his brother if he would read it in manuscript rather than wait for proofs.

“I am very anxious to see what you think of the whole bloody thing,” he told Bill. “I am still too close to the damn thing to see the wood, if any, for the interminable array of trees. The bulk of it looks fairly impressive, just as bulk, but I don’t know how it will strike as an evening’s reading. I’m telling the family to send the carbon on to you, if you want it. It will look cleaner in the proof but then — well, you can see that I am suffering from the usual pains of the afterbirth.”

While he waited anxiously for the reaction to the manuscript — “biting my nails,” he told Bill — Benét began to work on some short stories. His fellowship had been renewed in June for six months, to permit him to finish the poem, but the extension was almost up. “Mr. Guggenheim goes out of my life on January first,” he wrote his brother, “and will be mourned with appropriate ceremonies.”

His sense of obligation to the foundation was immense. He always emphasized that without its help he could never have written the poem. For the rest of his life he uncomplainingly read the numerous applications from other poets which Moe submitted to his judgment. “The Guggenheim fellowship,” Benét told an interviewer in 1930, “provided me with leisure to write the sort of thing I felt was worth while, and I did so, not thinking of results.” He was even more emphatic in private. “It damn near saved my life,” he told Phelps Putnam.

Brandt read John Brown’s Body over a weekend and sent Benét an enthusiastic cable on Monday morning. Bill Benét and Farrar were equally excited. Benét was pleased and relieved by their warmth, though wary of its extravagance. “Thanks inordinately for your letter,” he wrote Bill. “Only I wish the book were that good.” He was particularly encouraged by Farrar’s judgment that the poem had unity.

“You lose the feel of the whole,” Benét wrote back, “working on a thing of that size for so long, and can see nothing but the parts.” He had scrupulously avoided discussing the poem as long as he was working on it. Now for an instant he was uncharacteristically communicative about his work.

“I tried to put America in it,” he told Farrar, “at least some of the America I knew. If I did so, some of it should stand till a better man comes along. I feel rather curiously about it myself. I think my best work so far, perhaps, is in it and yet it is more detached from me than anything I have ever done. It seemed to me a thing of that sort should be tried. A poet of greater faculties would have avoided my failures in it and my superficialities — and there are many of both — but what I have done, I have done to the extent of such capacities as I have.”

Benét was skeptical of some of Farrar’s praise. “As for genius,” he said, “I don’t know — but it did take persistence. Incidentally, if any criticisms, either of details or the whole, do come to you, please tell me them. When that thing was finished, I felt as if I had given birth to a grand piano.”

Farrar was anxious to set type immediately from the manuscript. Benét, conscious of the mechanical difficulties of printing a long poem, reluctantly cabled permission. He insisted, however, that he had to be given an opportunity to read the galley proofs in detail. “There are a number of checks on actual facts and some revisions,” he explained, “that nobody else could do for me. If I tried to do them now on the one old working copy I have — in which some of the corrections on yours arc missing — it would take quite as long as sending galleys over and back and probably get into an awful tangle as regards page references etc. as well. Also it will be the greatest help in the world to me to see that thing actually in type — it changes the whole appearance of the poem and makes errors stick out like sore thumbs. So, if you will, send me the galleys when you have them, and I will get them back just as soon as I possibly can.”

The galleys arrived in May, and he worked on them without interruption, knowing the urgency with which they were needed in New York. He persuaded Farrar to allow him a final check on the page proofs just before publication. “I have altered quite a number of lines,” he wrote the editor, “and made some cuts and additions and tried to catch all the errors. Probably some have escaped me but I have tried to work so no important corrections will be necessary in the page proof.”

He was very gloomy after he mailed the galleys. He had put in two years of the hardest kind of work, and now that it was done he felt a deadening sense of anticlimax. The last six months had been painful and exhausting, made difficult by the death of his father. He was convinced that the poem was a failure. “It’s a damn shame to have wasted the Guggenheim money that way,” he told a friend who visited them in Neuilly. “No one will read it.”

FARRAR persuaded his friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher, one of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s judges, to read the poem in proof. He sent Benét a copy of Mrs. Fisher’s enthusiastic letter. Benét, still gloomy, was cautious.

“I am glad, of course,” he wrote Farrar, after thanking him gratefully for the labor he was so clearly putting into the book, “that she seems to like J.B., but of course shan’t count on anything from either of the book clubs until I read the advertisement in the papers, if then. The ways of all committees have always been a profound mystery to me and I have seen too many things of that sort fail to click at the last moment. And if I had all the money I might have made on flukes I’d have broiled Rolls-Royces for breakfast. There is nothing like thirteen years of the so-called literary life for exploding Alnaschar’s castles.”

On June 14, however, Farrar’s optimism was vindicated. “John Brown Book of Month for August,” the cable to Neuilly read. “By next mail send us list critics friends associates who might be interested de luxe edition. Farrar.” Benét was properly stunned. He frugally cabled a two-word acknowledgment — “Swell. Benét” — and then wrote Farrar a long letter. “Your cable arrived early in the morning,” he told Farrar, “and I propped one eye open to read it. It left us quite breathless. I really did not expect such a thing, in my usual sour way, and was most pleasantly taken aback. That is swell. I know you must all have worked for it hard — you in particular — and my gratitude to you all is very genuine. I had of course envisaged the possibilities as I do of everything from sudden death to being adopted by a Rockefeller but was no less astonished for all that.”

Although Benét was delighted by the success of his poem, he had no illusions that it was the artistic perfection which so many of its reviewers had maintained. “A long poem without a flaw,” he said later, “has never been written,” He did what he could to discourage its presentation as an epic. From the beginning he himself had used instead the word “cyclorama.”

Farrar sent proofs of the poem to a number of prominent literary people, including E. A. Robinson. Robinson’s letter about John Brown’s Body, a copy of which the editor relayed to Benét, was, as the latter commented, “very Robinsonian.” The older poet, severe and judicious as always, told Farrar that “parts of it are very fine and parts of it are as bad as possible.” Robinson reconsidered the second adjective. “Bad isn’t exactly the word, for Benét knows what he is doing. Mistaken might be a better word.” He regretted that a poet of Benct’s gifts had not taken more time.

“Of course I agree with the dictum,” Benét told Farrar. “Poetry should be written in bronze. And I could have taken a couple more years to J.B. with advantage. But not, I think, with enormous advantage. I am not built that way. As it was I did my damnedest to smooth out the roughest of the verse. But ten years’ work could not have made some of the prosier passages much less prosy. The fault there is not only in me but in the nature of both subject and medium. As it is, I am content that he thinks some of it good. That is much from him.”

With time Benét’s own judgments on the poem became the most responsible ones. It survived, as he had predicted it would, on the basis of notable individual passages in each book and the cumulative effect of the whole. Later commentators found intricacies of imagery and theme which had escaped the hasty reviewers; they found a grandeur of scope and a unity of narrative which its early detractors had denied. In the late summer of 1928, the response to the book had a range and warmth which had not occurred in American poetry for three generations. Readers of John Brown’s Body reacted as American readers had not reacted since the publication of “Hiawatha” and “Evangeline” in the 1850s. For the rest of his life they wrote Benét letters about the book, from every part of the country — and when he died, and afterward, they wrote his widow as if in mourning for a dear friend.

John Brown’s Body brought Benét a great deal of money in 1928 and 1929 — about $25,000 — and there rarely was a year thereafter when it didn’t earn him from live hundred to a thousand dollars in book royalties alone. It made him a national figure at the age of thirty, known to thousands of Americans who knew the name of no other living American poet. He was alternately touched and exasperated by its enshrinement as an American classic.

“And there it is and could be worse,” he wrote in 1941, when his publishers issued an annotated edition with footnotes and an editor’s essay on the causes of the Civil War: