Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,159

This is the grave of Stephen Vincent Benét.

Born in 1898 in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, Benét grew up pretty well off. His grandfather was a brigadier general in the Civil War and his uncle invented the Hotchkiss machine gun. But the military was not going to be the path for young Benét. In fact, his parents seem to have pushed the idea of writing and arts on their kids since a few of them would end up in the literary world. Still, he had to go the military path through school. At the age of 10, his parents sent him to a military academy in California. The idea of sending your young children to a military school–or any boarding school really–is totally incomprehensible to me. I fully recognize that parenting and childhood change over time and maybe it’s different when your kid is in high school, but at the age of 10? This came to my mind the other day because someone I knew mentioned one of the boarding schools that still exist in New England and I was just really struggling to imagine dumping your kids–scared and lonely–into this space and see what happens and hey, see you next summer! Just odd to me.

Anyway, Benét then went to another boarding school in Georgia and then it was on to Yale. He did very well there, becoming a leader of the campus literary community. He was already a published poet by this time and after publishing his third book of poetry, Yale was like, OK fine you don’t need a thesis to graduate. He went to Europe after graduating, married an American woman he met there, and kept writing.

Benét is largely forgotten today except for a couple of things and I wonder what that reputation would have been had he lived longer. He was writing all over the place–poetry, short stories, magazine articles. I don’t know and the reason might be that he was an epic poet of an American history that doesn’t necessarily play that well in the modern context. It can play as pretty broad. That provides him some popularity in some circles still though. In 1928, he published “John Brown’s Body.” which won the 1929 Pulitzer in Poetry. This set him up in a style that would work for him–mining the American past for contemporary drama. Part of it goes:

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.
Spread over it the bloodstained flag of his song,
For the sun to bleach, the wind and the birds to tear,
The snow to cover over with a pure fleece
And the New England cloud to work upon
With the grey absolution of its slow, most lilac-smelling rain,
Until there is nothing there
That ever knew a master or a slave
Or, brooding on the symbol of a wrong,
Threw down the irons in the field of peace.
John Brown is dead, he will not come again,
A stray ghost-walker with a ghostly gun.

What I know Benét for more than anything is “The Ballad of William Sycamore,” another long epic poem about the conquest of the West. The reason I know this is that the western/folk/cowboy music types have turned this into song on several occasions. Tom Russell has a good version of it on his Song of the West album. Back around 2005 or so I went to a cowboy poetry/song event in Santa Fe that included people such as Don Edwards and Waddie Mitchell and the latter recited a good bit of it as part of his act, which was super. The thing is super long and no one does the entire thing, but here’s the bit I know from Russell’s recording:

My father, he was a mountaineer,
His fist was a knotty hammer;
He was quick on his feet as a running deer,
And he spoke with a Yankee stammer.

And some are wrapped in the linen fine,
And some like a godling’s scion;
But I was cradled on twigs of pine
And the skin of a mountain lion.

Till I lost my boyhood and found my wife,
A girl like a Salem clipper!
A woman straight as a hunting-knife
With as eyes as bright as the Dipper!

We cleared our camp where the buffalo feed,
Unheard-of streams were our flagons;
And I sowed my sons like the apple-seed
On the trail of the Western wagons.

They were right, tight boys, never sulky or slow,
A fruitful, a goodly muster.
The eldest died at the Alamo.
The youngest fell with Custer.

The letter that told it burned my hand.
Yet we smiled and said, “So be it!”
But I could not live when they fenced the land,
For it broke my heart to see it.

I saddled a red, unbroken colt
And rode him into the day there;
And he threw me down like a thunderbolt
And rolled on me as I lay there.

Now I lie in the heart of the fat, black soil,
Like the seed of a prairie-thistle;
It has washed my bones with honey and oil
And picked them clean as a whistle.

And my youth returns, like the rains of Spring,
And my sons, like the wild-geese flying;
And I lie and hear the meadow-lark sing
And have much content in my dying.

Go play with the towns you have built of blocks,
The towns where you would have bound me!
I sleep in my earth like a tired fox,
And my buffalo have found me.

Here’s the Russell rendition.

It’s really kind of great. It’s also pure, unadulterated settler colonialism historical narrative, to use the parlance of our times. How does one really reckon with this Turnerianism? It’s not easy for a modern liberal to do so. But in Benét’s day, this was just standard fare. Across the political spectrum, the idea of a heroic democracy carved out of frontier soil was tremendously powerful. This is how Arthur Schlesinger could write The Age of Jackson and not even mention Indian Removal. It just didn’t matter to the narrative because indigenous people existed to be moved along and to disappear. I’ve seen these narratives from people well to the left of Schlesinger too while researching some of the New Deal cultural figures. It’s not quite that Benet or these people didn’t think of Native Americans. It’s that they were relegated to the past. Incidentally, Dee Brown took the title of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee from Benét’s poem “American Names.”

Benét was a big time short story writer too. “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” from 1936, about a farmer who sells his soul to the devil and then is defended by the famed Massachusetts senator has been adapted into all sorts of plays and films. It continued Benet’s theme of using his vision of the American past as material. 1937’s “By the Waters of Babylon” moved him to post-apocalyptic writing and was a response to Guernica, which horrified him. Many of his stories were a sort of proto-science fiction, quite a bit different than much of his poetry, or at least the most famous works. He also co-wrote the script for D.W. Griffith’s 1930 Abraham Lincoln biopic and then the screenplay for the 1941 adaptation of “The Devil and Daniel Webster.”

I wonder what would have become of Benet’s career, since he was a young man in a rapidly changing America as the nation began to turn the tide in World War II. He sure doesn’t seem to have fit into the midcentury explosion of American literature. But he may well have done very well in the growing sci-fi world that exploded at the same time. But we can’t know because he died of a heart attack in 1943. He was all of 44 years old.

Stephen Vincent Benét is buried in Stonington Cemetery, Stonington, Connecticut.

If you would like this series to visit other 20th century American poets, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Malcolm Cowley is in Sherman, Connecticut and Horace Gregory is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.