Taken together, they form a kind of anthology of major American voices in contrast to the anonymous voices of Spoon River. They also fill in some of the interstices to understanding the complexity of political opinions and poetic feelings that formed the voice of this uniquely talented American poet. Indeed, his disapproval of the America that survived the Civil War clearly anticipates the anger of American poets like Allen Ginsberg and others during the Eisenhower fifties and the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam War era. In both cases, the political became openly linked with the poetical.

At the urging of Vachel Lindsay’s widow (after Lindsay committed suicide in 1931), Masters wrote an authorized biography of the author of General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems (1913). Like Masters, Lindsay hailed from Lincoln country in Illinois, from Springfield in fact. Along with Masters and Sandburg, he was known as one of the exponents of the “new poetry” so disparaged by Howells and other Victorian critics still tied to the merits of rhyme and meter. Masters and Lindsay had known each other personally, though admittedly the paths of the two poets had diverged, for while Masters defended the economically downtrodden in Chicago, Lindsay had devoted his early life to tramping around the country, trading poems for food. Such an itinerant poet’s life made for interesting reading, and Vachel Lindsay:A Poet in America (1935) is still considered a valuable part of the scholarship on this poet.

Although it lacked the original research of the Lindsay biography, Masters’s Whitman (1937) is a poet’s appreciation of an equal in American letters. He very much admired the Poet of Democracy’s Western sensibilities, though he is probably the earliest biographer to openly express bewilderment over Whitman’s sexual orientation. He visited the poet’s last residence on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, during his research for the biography. On the back cover of his dust jacket Masters is pictured standing in ramrod posture on the front stoop to Whitman’s humble abode. As he was with Dreiser, Masters was disappointed in what he perceived to be Whitman’s lack of knowledge of the classics (an erroneous view due to Whitman’s decision not to sing of Old World themes). Yet the rigid, almost military pose suggests both his respect for as well as his identification with Whitman’s greatness as a poet. The photograph harkens back to a similar image that adorned the March 4, 1916, front page of the Literary Digest under the headline, “Another Walt Whitman.” Masters, it has been said, did not “look like” a poet. In the dust-jacket photo, he dons coat and tie and looks down into the camera with the hauteur of somebody whose political heroes were Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, men of principle instead of individuals of pragmatism and compromise like Lincoln and Twain.

In Lincoln: The Man (1931), the poet fell back on his grandfather’s dislike of the sixteenth president and wrote—in the words of Masters’s biographer—“a series of family biases made public.” “The time has arrived,” the memoir opened, “when [Lincoln’s] apotheosis can be touched with the hand of rational analysis.” He blames Lincoln for starting the Civil War, suggesting that he was a closet abolitionist all along, and sees him as a symbol of the centralized government, which could only be erected, citing John C. Calhoun, on “the ruins of liberty.” If Stephen Douglas had become president, he argued, the war would have been averted. He adopts Whitman’s own position well before the war that chattel slavery was a small evil compared to “loss of reason and free speech.”

At the turn of the twentieth century Masters favored free silver, or the silver standard as part of the basis of our currency, and he had thrilled to William Jennings Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic convention for president in Chicago. After hearing it, he dedicated himself to the common man it supported. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” he quoted Bryan’s famous words in his autobiography, “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The gold standard, which soon prevailed, had devastating effects on farmers, workers, and small-business people, and it is often cited as a contributing factor to the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression. It was during the early years of the Depression, and just a year before the United States abandoned the gold standard, that Masters wrote his biography of a Lincoln who had set in motion, in Masters’s opinion, the replacement of the dignity of the individual for a nation of empire and privilege.

Naturally, Masters’s attack on Lincoln didn’t win him many friends and admirers but instead appeared to cement his reputation as a surly American poet out of sync with the intellectual harmony of the country. He appeared to be turning into an angry iconoclast, as he increasingly scorned public appearances and prevented the anthologizing of his poems. This image was notably deepened when he published a biography of Mark Twain, whose best work was then undergoing a serious revaluation. Here Masters even found himself across the aisle from Mencken, one of his most earnest champions as well as Twain’s. The opening paragraph of Mark Twain: A Portrait (1938) suggests the core of the humorist’s problem in Masters’s view: essentially, Mark Twain was a Southerner who had betrayed his origins and the ideals they stood for.

“Mark Twain traced his ancestry to Virginia, to Samuel Clemens, who married Pamela Goggin and fathered her five children,” he wrote at the beginning of his portrait. “The eldest was John Marshall Clemens, born August 11, 1798. That he was not named Thomas Jefferson Clemens may reveal the political tendencies of Samuel, and explain the subsequent party alliances of his son Mark Twain.” (In other words, Twain’s father was named for the wrong Virginian because the Supreme Court chief justice had been a vocal champion of federalism, whereas Jefferson favored states’ rights.) Though born in humble surroundings, Twain became a supporter of the Republican Party. Masters attacked Twain for wasting his satirical talent on the absurdities of the Bible at the expense of focusing it on the political corruption of his day. Twain, he added, ironically became one of the biggest victims of the Gilded Age—about which he coauthored a satiric account in 1874—mainly because of his heavy investments in the unsuccessful Paige Typesetter in the 1880s, which helped drive his publishing company into bankruptcy.

Masters drew heavily on Van Wyck Brooks’s 1920 thesis in The Ordeal of Mark Twain that Mark Twain, the humorist, had sold Sam Clemens, the artist, down the river. And he berated Twain for not continuing his service in the Confederate Army, which he had briefly joined in 1861, instead abandoning his post for silver mining in Nevada. The biography made most Twain scholars livid, and it hurt Masters financially in the long run.