Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) had a name to conjure with, back in the day. Once upon a time, all of literate America knew his book-length poem about the Civil War, “John Brown’s Body” (1928) and such short stories as “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936). He edited prose and judged literary competitions. He wrote charmingly of his travels and filled the pages of popular magazines with his always professional stories and poems. Benét was a omnipresent figure in his middlebrow time — and nonetheless his work seemed to blow away like dust in the two decades after his death. By the 1970s, mention of him produced little more than readers’ slightly furrowed brows as they tried to remember where they heard that name before. His best-known line may be the final line of today’s Poem of the Day — and that mostly because the historian Dee Brown (1908–2002) used it, in ironic reversal of Benét’s comedy into tragedy, as the title of his best-selling account of the destruction of the American Indian tribes, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” (1970). But it may be worth our remembering some of the original, for Benét had a light but clever touch. In five-line stanzas (extended by a sixth line for closure in the last verse), “American Names” plays the place-names of Europe against those of the poet’s home. For such as “Henry and John” (sniping a little at Henry Adams and John Dos Passos), Europe may seem an irresistible lure. But Benét is taken with such American names as Spartanburg and Painted Post, French Lick and Skunktown Plain.