Western Star
by Stephen Vincent Benét
Summary
Western Star is Stephen Vincent Benét's attempt at a narrative poem on the American settling of the continent, tracing the movement of people westward across the land in the same book length, historically grounded verse form he had already used, more than a decade earlier, for John Brown's Body, his 1928 narrative of the Civil War that won him his first Pulitzer in 1929. Where that earlier poem had a defined historical event to organize itself around, Western Star set out to cover something far larger and less bounded, the whole westward movement of American settlement, and Benét was still working on it, planning it as part of a still larger project, when he died of a heart attack in March 1943 at age forty four.
What survives is therefore a fragment of an intended whole rather than a finished narrative arc, and its planned full scope, its structure and which specific episodes of westward settlement it meant to cover are not clearly documented. What is certain is the ambition behind it: Benét reaching, in the last months of his life, for a second book length historical narrative on the scale of John Brown's Body, this time aimed at America's founding and territorial growth rather than at its Civil War.
Reading Western Star means encountering an American epic poet's unfinished last major work, published and honored only after his death, and it suits a reader already familiar with John Brown's Body who wants to see the same historical ambition turned toward an even larger, ultimately uncompleted subject.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Stephen Vincent Benét the 1944 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Western Star, awarded posthumously the year after his death in March 1943. The board's own description called it an unfinished narrative poem on the settling of the United States, honoring the fragment Benét left behind rather than a completed work.
The prize made Benét, alongside his older brother William Rose Benét, one half of the first pair of siblings to each win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, since William had won in 1942 for The Dust Which Is God. Benét's earlier John Brown's Body appeared on Life magazine's 1944 list of the hundred outstanding books published between 1924 and 1944, a recognition that placed his unfinished last poem in the shadow of his own earlier, completed triumph, John Brown's Body, in assessments of the era's major American writing.