John Brown’s Body

Stephen Vincent Benet set out to put the whole American Civil War into a single long poem, and he very nearly managed it. Running from John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry to the close of the war, the narrative moves between real figures like Lincoln, Lee, and Davis and invented ones from North and South, soldiers and enslaved people and the women who wait for them. Benet shifts his verse forms to match each scene, from ballad to blank verse to something close to prose, building a panorama of a nation tearing itself apart. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929 and became one of the most widely read American poems of its century. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB edition.