John Brown's Body (poem)

John Brown's Body is an epic poem by American poet Stephen Vincent Benét.Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943)

 History 
In 1925 Stephen Vincent Benét decided to write a long poem. With this proposal he approached the Guggenheim Foundation. He asked for 2 500 dollars and got it. Then he went to France. He settled in Paris and began to write. The poem was published in 1928. At once it became very popular. No American poem gained such popularity earlier. Ever Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's works were not so widely read. 130 000 copies of the book were sold during two years. For this poem the poet received the Pulitzer Prize in 1929. Many years later he got the second Pulitzer Prize for the poem Western Star.

 Form 
The poem in written in many measures. The poet employs both regular blank verse,Blank verse, poetic form. free verse and different stanzas. This fragment is an example of classical blank verse.

 Jack Ellyat had been out all day alone, 
 Except for his new gun and Ned, the setter, 
 The old wise dog with Autumn in his eyes, 
 Who stepped the fallen leaves so delicately 
 They barely rustled. Ellyat trampled them down 
 Crackling, like cast-off skins of fairy snakes. 
 He'd meant to hunt, but he had let the gun 
 Rest on his shoulder.

From time to time the poet uses alliteration.Alliteration, literature.

 Where the skyscrapers lift their foggy plumes
 Of stranded smoke out of a stony mouth
 You are that high stone and its arrogant fumes,
 And you are ruined gardens in the '''South''

 The story told 
John Brown's Body is a poem about Civil War in America. The story begins with John Brown and his deeds.Stephen Vincent Benét It ends with general Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. In this work historical and fictional persons are presented together. In 1953 Charles Laughton turned the poem into a play.Stephen Vincent Benét, American writer. It was performed in many theatres in America.

 References 

 Bibliography 
Project Gutenberg: John Brown's Body (1928) (full text)
 John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benét, 1928.

Category:Epic poems
Category:1928 works
Category:20th-century American poems