Epic is by its nature a political form, one that is by necessity often associated with the status quo. Virgil’s Aeneid was written for the Emperor Augustus; Spenser’s The Faerie Queene for Elizabeth I. Both could smooth over, obscure, ignore, deceive, and bamboozle as much as the best of propaganda. John Brown’s Body is no different. Written at a time when historiography had shifted into hagiography, when even northern scholars were fine with embracing a myth about the chivalrous South in the interests of national unity, Benét’s poem was composed not to mourn those in bondage or who fought for their freedom, nor for the abolitionists who held America to its highest ideals, nor to condemn the Confederate traitors who marched against their own nation. Benét sought rather to imagine a sutured-together version of that same country, bestriding its new global position after being forged in the war.
The historian R. Blakeslee Gilpin argues in a chapter from John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change that by “celebrating the rationales and heroism of both Union and Confederacy,” the epic “minimized its compromised relationships” with the actual causes of the war. Benét could conclude that we must “Bury the South… Bury the bygone South” and the “sick magnolias of the false romance / And all the chivalry that went to seed,” but not in the service of emancipation. Rather, he drew these conclusions because “Out of John Brown’s strong sinews the tall skyscrapers grow… Out of this heart the chanting buildings rise.” As Gilpin explains: “Benét reinforced the dominant legend of the war by emphasizing America’s historical destiny over these complicating factors,” whereby the nation’s “present and the future [are] unanswerable for the tragedies of the past.”
