Stephen Vincent Benet, being a popular poet, was never entirely popular with the professional poetry critics. They respected him as a craftsman and admired his versatility. However, I think they were just a little dismayed not only by the obstreperously unpoetical pages of “John Brown’s Body” but by the more basic fact that almost everything he wrote was easy to understand. 

Benet, at the time of his grievous death, was coming to occupy in this country a position somewhat similar to those occupied in England by Tennyson and Kipling during their periods. But there was one difference: Tennyson and Kipling, working within a fairly integrated culture, enjoyed the plaudits of the critics as well as the approval of the people. Benet, working within a split culture, where the abyss between the folk and the interpreters widens almost daily, had to content himself with a kind of unofficial recognition. Never so designated, he was really our Poet Laureate, a maker of national verse.

The hold such national poets have comes from their adherence to a few simple but deeply rooted emotions. In Benet’s case these emotions clustered around his vision of this country—its past, present, and future, its continental dimensions, the epic and tragic quality of its history, the variety and melodrama of its geography. If he was a nationalist—and he was—his nationalism was blood brother to that of the Founding Fathers, not to that of the Chicago Tribune. You will find it expressed most purely in the pieces he hammered out for the radio during his last two years, particularly “They Burned the Books” and “Listen to the People.” Synthetic patriotism is easy to put over on the air, as Es teners must know; Benet was never guilty of it by a single word or phrase. He wrote as a good American and also as a good poet.

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At his death he had completed the first book of a projected series of poetical narratives that would all have dealt with the westward movement of the American people. That first book, “Western Star,” has now been published. It is probable that, had its author lived, it would have been subjected to certain condensations and a final polishing. As it stands, it is an interesting, often beautiful narrative that does not quite pack a final punch.

The purpose of “Western Star” is to remind us of how we started. “And this, your house, was frontier,” he tells us, frontier when Jamestown was founded, and Plymouth. His theme is stated in Vergilian phrases:

Of sea and the first plantings and the men,
And how they came in the ships, and to what end.

The method of development depends on the use of three instruments: an invented narrative (the mercer’s apprentice, Dickon Heron, who came to Jamestown, and the Puritan girl, Humility Lanyard, who came to Plymouth); a series of historical pictures (Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower, the Mayflower Compact, etc.); these two given lyric elevation from time to time by the third, which consists of interpolated ballads and songs, some of them most lovely.

I quote one of these songs, sung by the widowed Alice Heron after her husband has been killed in an Indian raid. No one could write this kind of thing as did Stephen Vincent Benet, so simple, so true, so inevitable:

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Living and dead
And the white cloud overhead
And the grass new.
The child, born for the care,
The breast to give it there,
These things are true.

I was young. I knew the sweet.
It shook me from head to feet.
I’ll not deny it.
Yet, even when that’s gone,
There’s something must live on
And I live by it.

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I will plant posies still,
Knowing he loved them well
And me, his creature.
Yet give another man
Such bounty as I can,
For that’s my nature.

The nature that is made
Not choice of sun or shade,
Nor wanton nor afraid
But earth’s true lover.
That lives, like sky and grass,
That lives and will not pass,
That shares the thing it has
Over and over.

And, when I’m old and blind
And death comes with the wind
And flesh of mine must find
Long refuge for him,
My body I’ll prepare.
Yet life first sojourned there,
The strong son, hard to bear
And yet I bore him. ♦