Thank you, David Attenborough, for 100 incredible years of life on Earth
David Attenborough’s Unending Mission to Save Our Planet
“We tend to think we are the be all and end all—but we’re not. The sooner we can realize that the natural world goes its way, not our way, the better.”
Stephen Vincent Benét: They Burned the Books is also a 1942 book by Stephen Vincent Benét, likely referring to historical acts of censorship.
It was just the prelude… Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too.”
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
They Burned the Books (1942) is a dramatic radio play written by American poet Stephen Vincent Benét, not a reference to the author Vincent van Gogh. It was produced during World War II to protest Nazi censorship, specifically commemorating the 1933 Nazi-led book burnings. It highlights the importance of free thought and literature. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Key Details About the Book/Play:
- Author: Stephen Vincent Benét.
- Context: It was written to condemn the Nazi burnings of thousands of books by Jewish, communist, and liberal authors.
- Production: Originally broadcast over the National Broadcasting Company on May 11, 1942.
- Theme: The work serves as a warning against the destruction of knowledge and intellectual freedom by a "Gestapo" mentality. [1, 2, 3]
It is often cited as a powerful piece of wartime literature protesting censorship and the fascistic oppression of
Stephen Vincent Benét A review of “Western Star,” by Stephen Vincent Benét, with discussion of his career as a national poet and his radio pieces “They Burned the Books” and “Listen to the People.” 1942 Died 1943
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:
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.
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. ♦
