The Dust Which Is God
by William Rose Benét
Summary
William Rose Benét spent nearly three decades as the founding editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and The Dust Which Is God, the book length poem that won him the 1942 Pulitzer, turns that same editorial life into its own subject. Benét wrote it as an autobiographical verse narrative, tracing his own experience in confessional, reflective language rather than adopting a fictional speaker or a historical subject the way some of his prize winning contemporaries did. The result reads less like a sequence of separate lyrics than like a single sustained act of self examination carried out in verse.
Benét came from a literary family that shaped the material he had to draw on: his younger brother, Stephen Vincent Benét, would win this same prize twice, and his second wife, the poet Elinor Wylie, brought him into close contact with one of the era's other major modernist voices before her death in 1928. That family and marital history sits behind the introspective cast of The Dust Which Is God, a poet turning his own losses and his own literary inheritance directly into subject matter rather than working at a remove from them.
Reading the book means accepting a mode of poetry that was already becoming less fashionable by 1941, extended personal narrative told in traditional verse rather than in the compressed, image driven lyric that dominates much of Benét's era. It suits a reader interested less in a single memorable image than in a poet's sustained attempt to make sense, in verse, of his own life as an editor, brother and widower, and in the particular literary world, the Saturday Review and its circle, that this account grew out of.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave William Rose Benét the 1942 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Dust Which Is God, published in 1941. The award recognized a poet already well known as an editor rather than primarily as a working poet, since Benét had founded and continued to run the Saturday Review of Literature from 1924 until his death in 1950.
The prize also sits inside a small piece of family history: two years later, in 1944, his younger brother Stephen Vincent Benét won the same Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, posthumously, for Western Star, making the Benét brothers the first siblings to each win the poetry prize. William Rose Benét went on to compile The Reader's Encyclopedia in 1948, a reference work that outlasted much of his own poetry in general use, and he is still remembered today for the shorter poem The Skater of Ghost Lake alongside this Pulitzer winning book.