Masters recalls in his autobiography, Across Spoon River (1936), that Squire Davis, as a member of the Illinois legislature, had voted against Lincoln for the Senate in 1854. Petersburg, located on the Sangamon River in Menard County, represented for Masters the tradition and life of the South before America was incorporated as a result of the Civil War and the decline of agrarian values. As he wrote in Spoon River’s “Jacob Goodpasture” (the surname rather clumsily suggesting agrarian goodness):


When Fort Sumter fell and the war came
I cried out in bitterness of soul:
"O glorious republic now no more!”

Masters’s paternal roots went back to the states of Tennessee and Virginia, whereas the maternal side of his heritage originated in New England. His mother’s political background, or cultural point of view, was best represented for Masters in Lewistown, five miles from the Spoon River, and thirty miles or so northwest of Petersburg. As he recalled in “The Genesis of Spoon River,” published in 1933 in his friend H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, Lewistown was a community “where political lines were bitterly drawn by the G. A. R. [Grand Army of the Republic], . . . and where New England and Calvinism waged a death struggle on the matter of Prohibition and the church with the Virginians and free livers.” His father, Hardin Masters, opposed Prohibition and most restrictions on personal liberty, while his wife favored a more puritanical approach to life.

Indeed, this South-North division between Petersburg and Lewistown was reflected in the tensions in the marriage of his parents. In his autobiography, Masters expresses mixed feelings not only about his parents but also about his sister and others that would form the basis of the bitterness found in the lives of his fictional characters. He clearly favored his father over his mother and came to admire his father’s tenacity at opposing hypocrisy wherever he found it. Yet he was first inspired to write Spoon River poems in conversations with his mother. “In our talks now,” he wrote, “we went over the whole past of Lewistown and Petersburg, bringing up characters and events that had passed from my mind. We traced these persons to their final fates, to the positions in life that they were then in.”

Masters, who achieved poetic fame with free verse and a naturalistic theme, first formed his interest in poetry by studying the classics mostly on his own and reading such English romantic poets as Shelley and Keats. He soon discovered Whitman along with Ralph Waldo Emerson—eventually writing or editing books about each. Even though these two writers came from the North, Masters found in them the same commitment to pioneer values and an allegiance to nature and the land that he admired in the Illinois people he knew. He also read the works of William Cullen Bryant and Edgar Allan Poe, among other American poets. As Masters wrote in Across Spoon River about this time in his literary and political development, he began to see that he had a passion for democracy, which he also inherited from his father, “and that my father’s democracy and integrity were the roots out of which my devotion to Shelley’s poetry took immediate nourishment. And to what ends Shelley led me! To more metaphysics, to Plato, to the Greek writers.”

It is not an exaggeration to say that Edgar Lee Masters gave himself utterly to a life of poetry, even while spending the first twenty or so years of his adult life as a Chicago attorney who handled mostly labor cases. He was in the middle of a huge legal case involving striking waitresses when he finally began to turn out the epitaphs that would make up his magnum opus. For this and earlier poetic works, he had generally written under a pseudonym to protect his law practice. It hadn’t really mattered, however, because none of his books attracted much attention until he published Spoon River Anthology, which ironically he never considered his finest poetic achievement because it was not written in conventional verse. He thought his best work was Doomsday Book (1920), a poetic chronicle written in blank verse and set in World War I.

William Marion Reedy, a leftist editor who had published one of Dreiser’s earliest short stories in the Mirror in 1901, encouraged Masters to contribute his epigrammatic poems to his magazine, where they began to appear on May 29, 1914. Clusters of them appeared throughout 1914 and part of 1915, when Masters finally dubbed himself as “Webster Ford” and published the collection (though in a different arrangement) in book form. The 1915 edition contained 214 pieces, including “The Spooniad” (Reedy’s Mirror, December 18, 1914), described in the volume as a fragment of a planned epic in twenty-four books by Jonathan Swift Somers, “laureate of Spoon River.” Masters said at the time that he could have gone on writing his epitaphs, and in 1916 he issued an “augmented edition” with illustrations by Oliver Herford that had an additional thirty-one epitaphs and the “Epilogue,” which opens with a game of checkers in which Life is “checked by Death.” Following the match, a Satanic figure sounds a trumpet to assemble all the dead of Spoon River.

Masters’s writing of Spoon River Anthology was sometimes compared to Whitman’s writing Leaves of Grass. Whitman appears in Spoon River as a heroic counterexample to the pitiful “Petit, the Poet” (obviously a satirical self-portrait of the young Masters himself), whose “little iambics” tick on “While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines.” With Spoon River, Masters gave up the “tick, tick, tick” of his earlier “faint iambics” and tried to join the immortal Whitman.