Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters

First published: 1915

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Edgar Lee Masters is a rarity among writers: He established his reputation on the basis of one work, Spoon River Anthology. Masters was a prolific writer, producing many volumes of verse, several plays, an autobiography, several biographies, essays, novels, and an attempt to recapture his great success in a sequel, The New Spoon River. Except for a handful of individual poems from the other volumes, however, he will be remembered as the re-creator of a small midwestern town that he calls Spoon River. Spoon River is probably Lewiston, Illinois, where he studied law in his father’s office and practiced for a year before moving on to Chicago.

In form and style, Spoon River Anthology is not a work that sprang wholly out of Masters’s imagination; it is modeled on The Greek Anthology (dating from the seventh century b.c.e.), and the style of the character sketches owes a considerable debt to the English poet Robert Browning. Masters wrote his book with such an effortless brilliance and freshness that nearly a century after its first publication it retains a startling inevitability, as if this were the best and the only way to present people in poetry. From their graveyard on the hill, Masters lets more than two hundred of the dead citizens of Spoon River tell the truth about themselves, each person writing what might be his or her own epitaph. The secrets they reveal are sometimes shocking—stories of intrigue, corruption, frustration, adultery. On the other hand, the speakers tell their stories with a calmness and a simplicity that induce a sense of calmness and simplicity in the reader. As a result of its frankness, Spoon River Anthology provoked protest from readers who felt that the book presents too sordid a picture of American small-town life. While many of the poems are interrelated and a certain amount of suspense is created by having one character mention a person or incident to be further developed, the anthology is not centered on a unifying theme. About the closest approach to such a theme is the tragic failure of the town’s bank, chiefly attributed to Thomas Rhodes, its president, and his son Ralph, who confesses from the grave:

All they said was true:I wrecked my father’s bank with my loansTo dabble in wheat; but this was true—I was buying wheat for him as well,Who couldn’t margin the deal in his nameBecause of his church relationship.

Many people suffer from the bank’s collapse, including the cashier, who has the blame placed on him and serves a term in prison; but a far more corroding effect is the cynicism generated in the citizens when they find that their leaders, the “stalwarts,” are weak and culpable.

Masters pictures many vivid characters in Spoon River Anthology. They range from Daisy Fraser, the town harlot, who “Never was taken before Justice Arnett/ Without contributing ten dollars and costs/ To the school fund of Spoon River!”

to Lucinda Matlock, who

Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,And many a flower and medicinal weed—Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the  green valleys.At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,And passed to a sweet repose.

Others are the town physicians, Doc Hill and Doc Myers, both of whose lives are scarred; Petit, the Poet, whose “faint iambics” rattle on “while Homer and Whitman roared in the pines”; Ann Rutledge, from whose dead bosom the Republic blooms forever; Russian Sonia, a dancer who meets old Patrick Hummer, of Spoon River, and goes back with him to the town, where the couple live twenty years in unmarried content; and Chase Henry, the town drunkard, a Catholic who is denied burial in consecrated ground but who wins some measure of honor when the Protestants acquire the land where he is buried and inter banker Nicholas and wife beside the old reprobate.

Spoon River Anthology is weighted so heavily on the sordid side—abortions, suicides, adulteries—that the more cheerful and “normal” epitaphs come almost as a relief. Lucinda and Ann fit this category; others are Hare Drummer, who delights in the memory of a happy childhood; Conrad Siever, content in his grave under an apple tree he planted, pruned, and tended; and Fiddler Jones, who never can stick to farming and who ends up with “a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,/ And not a single regret.”

One especially effective device that Masters makes use of in his collection is the pairing of poems so that the reader gets a startling jolt of irony. For example, Elsa Wertman, a peasant woman from Germany, confesses that her employer, Thomas Greene, fathered her child and then raised it as his and Mrs. Greene’s. In the next poem, Hamilton, the son, attributes his great success as a politician to the “honorable blood” he inherits from Mr. and Mrs. Greene. There is also Roscoe Purkapile, who runs away from his wife for a year, telling her when he comes back that he was captured by pirates while he was rowing a boat on Lake Michigan. After he tells her the story, “She cried and kissed me, and said it was cruel,/ Outrageous, inhuman!” When Mrs. Purkapile has her say in the next poem, she makes it known that she is not taken in by his cock-and-bull story, that she knows he was trysting in the city with Mrs. Williams, the milliner, and that she refuses to be drawn into a divorce by a husband “who had merely grown tired of his marital vow and duty.”

Masters displays an amazing variety of effects in these short poems. His use of free verse undoubtedly helps to achieve this variety, for a stricter form or forms might make the poems seem too pat, too artificial. Sometimes Masters lets his characters’ only remembrance of life be a simple, vivid description, as when Bert Kessler tells how he met his death. Out hunting one day, Bert kills a quail, and when he reaches down by a stump to pick it up, he feels something sting his hand, like the prick of a brier: “And then, in a second, I spied the rattler—/ The shutters wide in his yellow eyes . . ./ I stood like a stone as he shrank and uncoiled/ And started to crawl beneath the stump,/ When I fell limp in the grass.”

Bert tells of his death without comment, but when Harry Williams describes how he was deluded into joining the army to fight in the Spanish-American War, in which he is killed, the poem is full of bitterness, horror, and brutal irony.

To say that every poem in this volume is successful would be as foolish as to contend that each entry in William Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence is a masterpiece. Masters frequently strains for an effect; for instance, “Sexsmith the Dentist” seems to have been created so that Sexsmith may remark, at the end, that what people consider truth may be a hollow tooth “which must be propped with gold”; and Mrs. Kessler, a washerwoman, is probably included so that she might observe that the face of a dead person always looks to her “like something washed and ironed.” There are other poems in which the speakers do not, so to speak, come alive. One suspects that the poet wrote a number of philosophical lyrics, some of them marred by clichés and cloying rhetoric, and then titled them with names selected at random.

In the main, however, Masters does a remarkable job in Spoon River Anthology. Anyone may recognize in these poems the people one sees every day, and, though one may not like to admit it, when these people die they may carry to the grave secrets as startling as those revealed by many of the dead of Spoon River.

Bibliography

Flanagan, John T. Edgar Lee Masters: The Spoon River Poet and His Critics. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974. Examines critical reaction over several decades and discusses attitudes toward Spoon River Anthology. Evaluates subject matter and poetic form. Includes descriptions of theatrical presentations.

Hallwas, John E., ed. Introduction and annotations to Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992. An excellent starting point. Hallwas’s introduction evaluates style, rhythm, meter, and literary influences; discusses social attitudes, focusing on the influence of American myths and democratic ideals on characterization. Notes and annotations include textual variations and provide real-life counterparts and explanations of period names and information. Includes an annotated bibliography.

Hollander, John. “Spoon River Anthology: A Late Appreciation.” In The Work of Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Hollander, a prize-winning poet, has compiled a collection of essays in which he expresses his opinions about what constitutes “good” poetry. Includes an analysis of Spoon River Anthology.

Masters, Edgar Lee. Across Spoon River: An Autobiography. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936. Masters’s autobiography begins with his early years in Petersburg and Lewiston, Illinois, and reveals incidents that are re-created in Spoon River Anthology. He compares and contrasts his legal and writing careers and discusses literary influences and his relationships with other writers, such as Carl Sandburg and Theodore Dreiser.

Primeau, Ronald. Beyond Spoon River: The Legacy of Edgar Lee Masters. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Detailed exploration of literary influences, from classical literature to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Analyzes style, comparing Masters’s poems with those of earlier writers. Discusses unusual blend of regionalism and unsentimental realism.

Russell, Herbert K. Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Comprehensive biography, in which Russell provides a multidimensional portrait of Masters the man and the writer.

Stanford, Michael. “The Cyclopean Eye, the Courtly Game, Admissions Against Interest: Five Modern American Lawyer Poets.” Legal Studies Forum 30, nos. 1-2 (2006): 9-45. Examines the legal careers and poetry of Masters and four other lawyer-poets to determine how the law, the legal system, and the lives of lawyers are reflected in twentieth century American poetry.

Wrenn, John H., and Margaret M. Wrenn. Edgar Lee Masters. Boston: Twayne, 1983. A good critical source, providing biographical information and tracing literary influences. Discusses organization, style, and language. Explores relationships between characters, stressing realistic portrayals of social repression and sexuality.