Now the previously sacrosanct village or small-town life is depicted as no better than life in the immoral and indifferent city. The characters’ voices in Spoon River Anthology speak from the grave about their tormented and twisted lives— illicit love affairs, betrayed confidences, political corruption, and miserable marriages. As much the result of the author’s own pessimistic view of life as any factually based record, Masters’s book sums up the life of a small town’s residents who simply know too much about one another and burn eternally, like the flickering souls in Dante’s Inferno.

There were a number of literary celebrities at Dreiser’s place that day in the summer of 1915, including many who are now as nearly as forgotten or out of fashion as Masters himself. There was, for example, the English novelist John Cowper Powys, who called Masters “the new Chaucer.” Dreiser himself compared the forty-five-year-old Masters to Walt Whitman, a view that was then widely held. Dreiser’s naturalistic fiction had exerted a strong influence on Masters. In 1912, he told the novelist after reading The Financier that he thought no one else understood the facts of American life more than Dreiser did. Masters even included Dreiser in his Spoon River Anthology under “Theodore the Poet,” who as a boy had waited patiently for crawfish to come out of their burrows on “the turbid Spoon”:


But later your vision watched for men and women
Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities,
Looking for the souls of them to come out,
So that you could see
How they lived, and for what[.]

Dreiser occupied a unique place in this collection of portraits arranged in a manner after The Greek Anthology, a collection of short poems in the first person (a technique recommended by his editor at the time, William Marion Reedy). For one thing, he is not dead. And, if the characters are also observers of life, they observe their own failures in life, their frustrations and their painful shortcomings, unlike Theodore the Poet.

Masters had written rhymed and metered verse in his first twelve books of poetry, plays, and political essays. Taking his title from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, he called his first volume of poems A Book of Verse in 1898. This was followed by another volume of conventional poems under the title of The Blood of the Prophets in 1905, but a year earlier he had tried his hand with political essays in The New Star Chamber and Other Essays. His early attempts in literature also included at least two verse plays. One, according to Herbert K. Russell, his only biographer, was entitled Benedict Arnold, which appeared around 1898. Another play, also radical in thought, was called Maximillian(1905); it contained a veiled complaint about America’s foreign policies in the Philippines. A year or two later, Masters turned to writing short verse plays, which he printed privately and tried unsuccessfully to get produced. These included Althea (1907), The Trifler (1908), and The Leaves of the Tree (1909), and their themes anticipated Spoon River Anthology in that he turned primarily to the troubled relations between men and women. By 1910, with his plays unsuccessfully circulating among actors and directors in the Chicago area, he returned to poetry under the pseudonym of Webster Ford in Songs and Sonnets (1910) and Songs and Sonnets: Second Series (1912). These poems were vaguely autobiographical in that they reflected his troubled marriage and at least one extramarital affair. As Masters shifted from public to personal themes, his language became less conventional and more vernacular, anticipating its application in his greatest work.

The 245 epitaphs in the augmented 1916 Spoon River Anthology (the basis for this Penguin edition) were written in free verse, or what William Dean Howells in one of the few negative notices dismissed as “shredded prose.” Howells, the “Dean” of American Letters at the time, hadn’t liked Whitman’s vers libre either. Nor had he approved of the naturalism of Sister Carrie, in which human beings are determined by the accident of nature—by their heredity and their environment. In Masters’s epitaphs of those many souls “sleeping on the hill” in the fictional town of Spoon River (the name derives from an actual spring near Lewistown, Illinois), the former residents are—like Dreiser’s characters—victims of sex. The dead in “The Hill,” the opening epitaph in Spoon River Anthology, include “Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith:”


One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart’s desire,
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag[.]

It is not only women who are the pawns of sex. In “Benjamin Pantier,” which may reflect Masters’s unhappiness in his first marriage, the speaker describes himself as being snared by convention, all the while tormented by his uncontrollable urge for other women: “Then she, who survives me, snared my soul / With a snare which bled me to death, / Till I, once strong of will, lay broken, indifferent [.]”

Edgar Lee Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas, in 1869, where his parents had temporarily relocated from Illinois. One of the prairie poets along with Hamlin Garland, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, Masters was also part of the Chicago Renaissance that included Sandburg, Dreiser, Floyd Dell, and others. He grew up in Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois. After a year at nearby Knox College, he relocated to Chicago, originally intending to become a newspaper reporter but ultimately establishing himself as a prominent lawyer. Most of the poems in Spoon River Anthology are loosely based on people he knew growing up in these two Midwestern towns, in the shadow of Lincoln country, haunted by legends like Lincoln’s purported first love affair with Anne Rutledge. It became the subject of the most famous poem in Spoon River Anthology:


I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

Even after his father, Hardin Masters, left Petersburg to establish a new law practice in Lewistown, young Masters continued to visit his paternal grandparents, Lucinda and Squire Davis Masters, on their farm outside Petersburg. It was from his grandfather, whom Masters cherished as the ideal American with roots deeply thrust into the soil of democracy, that he ultimately developed neo-Confederate sympathies that would often surface in what eventually became more than fifty volumes of poetry, plays, political essays, and biographies.

Both paternal grandparents make appearances in Spoon River Anthology (Lucinda and Davis Matlock, Aaron Hatfield).