John Brown’s Body First Edition Stephen Vincent Benet 1st Print w/Slipcase Box
$ 15.84
Description
John Brown’s Body First Edition Stephen Vincent Benet 1st Print w/Slipcase Box. "A long forgotten masterpiece. There is a final scene between a white Pennsylvania veteran and Spade that suggests a grudging briding of worlds through shared war experience. "A long forgotten masterpiece. Well worth reading for anyone interested in the American Civil War or what poetry once was." " Benet casts a wide net with his storytelling choices, bringing in a mix of historical figures (Lincoln, Davis, and the various generals,character arcs and the main plots revolve around the fictional characters. There is Jack Ellyat, a Union soldier; Clay Wingate, a young Southern aristocrat who similarly goes to war; Melora Villas and Sally Dupre, the women they love (Melora being a frontier woman, Sally a Southern belle); various other soldiers and women; and a few slave characters, such as Wingate's loyal servant Cudjo and the runaway slave Spade. On the subject of the blacks, Benet makes a point that his "heart is too white" to really tell their story, but all the same he does a laudable job of recognizing the complexities of the southern slave system, a barbaric cruelty that all the same produced some enduring emotional ties between people that make little sense to us. He also reminds us that the North, while wanting to free the slaves (though this was ultimately up for grabs; Lincoln is given a revealing dialogue to the Almighty about whether or not he should release the Emancipation Proclamation), was not a bastion of racial equality. There is a final scene between a white Pennsylvania veteran and Spade that suggests a grudging briding of worlds through shared war experience. Benet employs various different verse styles in the course of the poem, from rhyming couplets to ABAB rhymes to free verse without rhyme and limited metre, to prose on a couple of occasions."
