Other editions of book John Brown's Body:A Poem - Stephen Vincent Benet - Easton Press - Douglas Southall Freeman - John Steuart Curry Illustrations

Excerpt from John Brown's BodyBut only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land, As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers, Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows, As native as the shape of Navajo quivers, And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.Swift runner, never captured or subdued, Seven-branched elk beside the mountain stream, That half a hundred hunters have pursued But never matched their bullets with the dream, Where the great huntsmen failed, I set my sorry And mortal snare for your immortal quarry.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

One of the most widely read poems of our time, John Brown’s Body is Stephen Vincent Benét’s masterful retelling of the Civil War. A book of great energy and sweep, it swings into view the entire course of that terrible and decisive war, lighting up the lives of soldiers, leaders, and civilians, North and South, amidst the conflict. Generations of readers have found the book a compelling and moving experience. "Magnificently readable."—New Statesman. "It is not one of your tours de forces of intellect and technique, to be admired and then tucked away on the library shelf. It is a library of storytelling itself, a poem extraordinarily rich in action as well as actors, vivid, varied, and so expressive of many men and moods that prose could never have carried its electric burden."—Saturday Review. "A remarkable piece of imaginative reporting; and one in which not only the forces which make history are embodied in the speech and action of very diverse men and women but the ideas also of which these forces were the driving power."—London Times Literary Supplement.