Dictionary of Literary Biography on Stephen Vincent Benet
Stephen Vincent Benet drew upon American themes for his work, but his best-known poem, John Brown's Body (1928), was written in Paris. Benet was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the son of a professional soldier with a deep interest in American history. This interest and the family's nomadic movement between widely separated American army bases had a decisive influence on Benet's choice and development of the American themes which are at the heart of his work.
At the age of fifteen he began to write seriously, and by the time he entered Yale two years later, he had published his first volume of poetry, Five Men and Pompey (1915). Following brief stints in the army and the State Department, he graduated from Yale in 1919 and earned a master of arts degree there a year later. He spent 1920-1921 on a Yale traveling fellowship to Paris, where he completed his first novel, The Beginning of Wisdom (1921). While in Paris, he associated with his Yale friend, composer Douglas Moore, and the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and he spent time at Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. On this first trip to Paris he also met Rosemary Carr, a reporter on the European edition of the Chicago Tribune (also known as the Paris Tribune). After courtship there, they were married in Chicago in 1921. Following a honeymoon in France, they settled in New York, where Benet continued to write poetry, a number of short stories for popular magazines, and a third novel, Jean Huguenot (1923).
Benet was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1926, and the Benets moved to Paris, where he planned to use this financially secure time to write a long poem inspired by his growing involvement in the exploration of American legends and history. That autumn he began work on John Brown's Body and completed it at the end of 1927. Although Benet called it a "cyclorama," it is generally regarded as an epic poem organized around sketches of fictional and historical characters through whom he depicts the vast conflict of the Civil War. Published in 1928, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry the following year and ranks as his most important work. Its ambitious scale and intensely nationalistic, lyrical character appealed to a wide audience of readers.
The Benets remained in Paris until 1929. During that residence, Benet enjoyed a well-ordered and thoroughly domestic life while keeping alive his interest in the avant-garde literature of the era. Through friends like Archibald MacLeish and John Peale Bishop he stayed in touch with new artistic movements in the city. As a result of his relative freedom from financial worry during this brief period in his life, his physical remoteness from the United States, and his voracious reading in American history, he came to a new realization of the intensity of his feelings for his native country. It was that discovery in Paris which was to influence the course of his work for the rest of his life.
Benet died at the age of forty-four after years of ill health and recurrent financial worry. He had not only produced a prodigious body of poetry, short stories, and novels, but he had also been active as a lecturer, an editor, a book reviewer, and an opera librettist. Shortly before his death in 1943, he completed the opening portion of Western Star, intended to be an American epic larger in scale than John Brown's Body. This incomplete poem won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944. Benet's admiring readers rank him as the kind of mythical American poet Whitman had in mind. Less generous critics consider him a popularizer of our past. Measured by his exceptional grasp of American history, his anticipation of the development of scholarly folk studies, and the scale and lyrical intensity of his affection for America, he is clearly a national poet. Much of that achievement is the consequence of Benet's years in Paris, which gave him the distance to see his country clearly.
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