Stephen Vincent Benet
Stephen Vincent Benet
Stephen Vincent Benét /bᵻˈneɪ/was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. Benét is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and for two short stories, "The Devil and Daniel Webster"and "By the Waters of Babylon". In 2009, The Library of America selected Benét’s story "The King of the Cats"for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth22 July 1898
CountryUnited States of America
Defeat is a fact and victory can be a fact. If the idea is good, it will survive defeat, it may even survive the victory.
One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.
We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones.
And Thames and all the rivers of the kings Ran into Mississippi and were drowned. They planted England with a stubborn trust But the cleft dust was never English dust.
Life was a storm to wander through.
Even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it.
Technology will never rescue anyone from being a bad poet, but if you're good, it has the potential to do a lot of exciting things.
It is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast.
Something begins, begins;Starlit and sunlit, something walks abroadIn flesh and spirit and fire.Something is loosed to change the shaken world.
God pity us indeed, for we are human,And do not always seeThe vision when it comes, the shining change,Or, if we see it, do not follow it,Because it is too hard, too strange, too new,Too unbelievable, too difficult,Warring too much with common, easy ways,And now I know this, standing in this light,Who have been half alive these many years,Brooding on my own sorrow, my own pain,Saying "I am a barren bough. ExpectNor fruit nor blossom from a barren bough.
There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.
Oh, Georgia booze is mighty fine booze, The best yuh ever poured yuh, But it eats the soles right offen yore shoes, For Hell's broke loose in Georgia.
I had lost something in my youth and made money instead.