John Brown's Body

John Brown's Body

<p> From the thunderclap of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry to the silence that followed Lincoln's assassination, John Brown's Body sweeps across the full arc of the American Civil War in verse that is at once ferocious and tender, panoramic and intimate. </p> <p> Stephen Vincent Benét weaves together Union and Confederate soldiers, enslaved men and women, generals and civilians into a single vast tapestry — a nation tearing itself apart and searching, through blood and fire, for a new identity. At the center stands John Brown himself: visionary, fanatic, martyr — a man who believed God had chosen him to end slavery, and who set in motion forces no one could control. </p> <p> Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, John Brown's Body is one of the great unread masterworks of American poetry — ambitious in scope, extraordinary in its human detail, and as relevant to questions of race, sacrifice, and national reckoning as it has ever been. </p> <p> This is the poem that set out to tell the whole truth about America's defining war. It has never been surpassed. </p>