Young Adventure, A Book of Poems

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) was an American author, poet, short-story writer and novelist. He is best known for John Brown’s Body, a book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War published in 1928, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929. Young Adventure came much earlier, in 1918, when he was still a student at Yale.

In this early collection, readers can already detect the storyteller who would later write about American history and folklore. Benét likes narrative, strong images and the music of rhyme and rhythm. He draws on classical myth, medieval romance and modern city life with equal ease. The poems are best appreciated by listening to them one at a time, allowing each to create its own world. They provide an appealing glimpse of a poet at the very start of a remarkable career.

Several poems tell stories or imagine characters from legend, while others catch a moment of city life as quickly as a snapshot. The collection is also a record of a young poet’s reading, and listeners may notice echoes of the poets he admired. Its energy and freshness are the work of a writer who is still discovering how much he can do.

Seventeen recordings, about 84 minutes in all, are read by a LibriVox volunteer. The poems vary in length and in mood, so the collection can be heard straight through or dipped into by title, from the opening dedication to the last poem. A good way to listen is to treat each recording as a small separate story, then to notice afterwards how often a modern street or shop gives way to a figure out of legend.