In the mid-1920s, the American poet Stephen Vincent Benét, then living in Paris, entertained a huge, slightly mad ambition. He would write an epic poem on the Civil War. It would be a popular — indeed, a populist — poem, swarming with characters, fictional as well as historical, from runaway slaves to President Lincoln himself. Memoirs, archival records, and personal reminiscences would ensure accuracy of detail, but this was to be no dry history. With considerable skill, Benét wove ballads, martial ditties, hymns, and songs, into a verse narrative which would sweep, with unstoppable momentum, from the raid on Harper’s Ferry all the way to Appomatox. Though crowded with incident and a hubbub of contesting voices, the poem remains steadfastly fixed on the experience of war as seen from the ground. When he sat down to write, the war had been over for 60 years, but Benét wanted to make his readers feel the sheer slogging misery of it all. He wanted them to feel, as he put it, “The cold. The mud. The bleak wonder.”

The book, published in 1928 and still in print, was “John Brown’s Body” (Ivan R. Dee,336 pages,$14.95). Reading it cold, no one would ever guess that T.S. Eliot had published “The Waste Land” six years before or that the age of high modernism was in full swing in all the arts. As a poet, Benét was heroically unfashionable. Irony, that Modernist shibboleth, was not in his register; he would hardly have recognized one form of ambiguity, let alone seven. He wasn’t afraid to wax rhapsodic; he could be corny, melodramatic, sentimental. He cast himself, quite unapologetically, in a bardic mode.

That is the weakness of “John Brown’s Body” as poetry; there are few passages or individual lyrics that can stand alone. But its simplicity is also the book’s great strength. A more consciously sophisticated poet would have fragmented the narrative or spliced it with sly allusions in the manner of Pound’s “Cantos.” Benét is direct and linear; he prefers the hammer to the rapier. This, coupled with his unabashed patriotism, has consigned his work to official oblivion. And yet the poem remains enduringly popular, and a distinguished historian has told me that she considers it the best single book ever written on the Civil War.

Rereading “John Brown’s Body” after many years — it enthralled me as a teenager — I find it much subtler than I’d realized. True, some of the verse can make you wince, and some of the dialogue, especially that of the freed slaves, is comically stilted. (Like most American writers, with the exception of Mark Twain, Benét had no ear for dialect.) But he described battles superbly — both Bull Run and Gettysburg are brilliantly rendered — and he had a rare gift for capturing historical figures in vivid cameos. There’s something cinematic in his evocation of the defeated Robert E. Lee as glimpsed by a young aide-de-camp:

He saw, imprinted on the yellow light
That made the tent a hollow jacko’-lantern,
The sharp, black shadow of a seated man,
The profile like a profile on a bust.
Lee in his tent, alone.
He had some shadow-papers in his hand,
But you could see he was not reading them.
And, if he thought, you could not read his thoughts,
Even as shadows, by any light that shines.

Here and elsewhere, he catches the essential enigma of Lee, at once public and unknowable. But he’s good on all the generals and the statesmen. Of Stonewall Jackson he rightly remarks on the “strange secretive grain of harsh poetry” in his peculiar makeup, and Ulysses Grant, the “family failure,” stands before us in all his improbable, stogie-wreathed military genius. Benét had a strong sense of place, too. Wartime Richmond is pungently evoked, as is “fish-hook Gettysburg,” and of the nation’s capitol he writes:

Muddy Washington, with its stillunfinished Capitol,
Sprawling, badly-paved, beset with sharp hogs
That come to the very doorsteps and grunt for crumbs.

Benét was stubbornly evenhanded in his treatment of the war. Though he saw it as a struggle against the monstrous evil of slavery — and gave a chilling portrait of a pious slaver in his “prelude” to the poem — he refrained from condemnation. He remained skeptical of all heroes and heroics. John Brown, whose fierce spirit animates the poem from start to finish, is harsh and repellent, a necessary zealot, yet even he has a final epiphany:

They did not hang him in the jail or the Square.
The two white horses dragged the rattling cart
Out of the town. Brown sat upon his coffin.
Beyond the soldiers lay the open fields
Earth-colored, sleepy with unfallen frost.
The farmer’s eye took in the bountiful land.
“This is a beautiful country,” said John Brown.

More intriguingly, Benét seems to have viewed the war as a tragedy of shadows. Even as they fight, struggle, and die, the players are already ghosts. “Call the dead men out of the mist and watch them ride,” he writes. And despite “the patchings of wounds, the freezing in winter camps, / The vain mud-marches, the diarrhea, the wastage,” he can declare, “We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make.” This spooky sense of tragic futility gives the poem its unexpected depth.

In true epic fashion, Benét opens “John Brown’s Body” with an invocation to the muse, but it is an “American Muse,” from “gray Maine rocks” and “Massachusetts lawns” to “the cowboys riding in from Painted Post.”And we realize as we read that “John Brown’s body” is the land itself, “the pure elixir, the American thing.” The armies that swept across it are tragic but transitory. Benét ends his epic with a puzzling admonition, as pertinent in our time as it was almost 80 years ago:

So, when the crowd gives tongue
And prophets, old or young,
Bawl out their strange despair
Or fall in worship there,
Let them applaud the image or condemn
But keep your distance and your soul from them.

eormsby@nysun.com