Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) had a name to conjure with, back in the day. Once upon a time, all of literate America knew his book-length poem about the Civil War, “John Brown’s Body” (1928) and such short stories as “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936). He edited prose and judged literary competitions. He wrote charmingly of his travels and filled the pages of popular magazines with his always professional stories and poems. Benét was a omnipresent figure in his middlebrow time — and nonetheless his work seemed to blow away like dust in the two decades after his death. By the 1970s, mention of him produced little more than readers’ slightly furrowed brows as they tried to remember where they heard that name before. His best-known line may be the final line of today’s Poem of the Day — and that mostly because the historian Dee Brown (1908–2002) used it, in ironic reversal of Benét’s comedy into tragedy, as the title of his best-selling account of the destruction of the American Indian tribes, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” (1970). But it may be worth our remembering some of the original, for Benét had a light but clever touch. In five-line stanzas (extended by a sixth line for closure in the last verse), “American Names” plays the place-names of Europe against those of the poet’s home. For such as “Henry and John” (sniping a little at Henry Adams and John Dos Passos), Europe may seem an irresistible lure. But Benét is taken with such American names as Spartanburg and Painted Post, French Lick and Skunktown Plain.American Namesby Stephen Vincent BenétI have fallen in love with American names, The sharp names that never get fat, The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat. Seine and Piave are silver spoons, But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn, There are English counties like hunting-tunes Played on the keys of a postboy’s horn, But I will remember where I was born. I will remember Carquinez Straits, Little French Lick and Lundy’s Lane, The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane. I will remember Skunktown Plain. . . .Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart-Yard, Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman’s Oast, It is a magic ghost you guard But I am sick for a newer ghost, Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post. Henry and John were never so And Henry and John were always right? Granted, but when it was time to go And the tea and the laurels had stood all night, Did they never watch for Nantucket Light? I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse. I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea. You may bury my body in Sussex grass, You may bury my tongue at Champmedy. I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
