Spoon River Anthology Read Online

There were few writers-in-residence programs in American colleges during his time, and most of these were controlled by the very professors who had complained about Masters’s attack on one of their most cherished authors. Perhaps encouraged by the fact that Frost enjoyed a succession of university posts as a resident poet, Masters kept asking his aspiring bibliographer Sanders why he was being ignored for the same kind of position at the University of Michigan. “What would be a practicable way to get in touch with some college, there to sit about and talk to students about literature?” he asked the professor in 1943. He was getting desperate as he was being routed “out of my nice suite” on the second floor of the Chelsea by resident soldiers who were noisy and disruptive.

Masters died, nearly penniless, at the age of eighty-one in a nursing home outside Philadelphia in 1950. By then some of the most popular poems in the original Spoon River collection were still appearing in anthologies and would continue to do so for several more decades. His second wife had finally convinced him to give up his resistance to having his Spoon River poems appear in anthologies. He feared the exposure would hurt his other works, but the fact is that Spoon River Anthology today exists in the national memory as piecemeal poems. The collection taken as a whole does not come together in quite the way of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio or the scenes in Our Town. There are perhaps too many voices, regardless of whether some nineteen story lines, as he claimed in “The Genesis of Spoon River,” overlap. Nevertheless, it does remain in some essential way the prototypical story of the American village speaking from the grave and admitting things that could not be broached in life.

Spoon River Anthology survives in the national literary consciousness as the work that initiated a huge change in American literature but was subsequently upstaged or eclipsed by similar but superior works that it had clearly inspired. The subsequent decline of Masters’s reputation today may be as much the result of the poet wars of the 1920s and 1930s as anything else. Masters, even though he had been trained as a lawyer, proved to be anything but subtle or indirect in his relations with other writers. He was not always diplomatic but in fact painfully candid with others in potential conflicts. Like Whitman, he didn’t seem to care that much about money and was happy living in the Chelsea with its worn carpets and financially strapped resident artists. Despite his reduced circumstances because of a divorce that levied heavy alimony payments on him for many years and resulted in the loss of property, he was content to live out his life writing poetry after having reluctantly practiced law for so many years.

No doubt, some of what he wrote deserves a second look. Certainly, Spoon River Anthology does. There is a reason to consider it again as an American classic. In the language of the “new poetry,” or free verse, it tells the story of these village malcontents in the American vernacular. Take, for example, “Hod Putt” (hard put), the second epitaph in the book, in which a man is hanged for killing another during a robbery. Masters captures the slangy sound of the American Midwesterner. In “Thomas Rhodes,” one of the best poems, we learn of the banker who breaks the bank but survives personally. There is “Elliott Hawkins,” who looked like Abraham Lincoln: “I was one of you, Spoon River, in all fellowship[.]” A lobbyist for the rich (which is what Masters imagined Lincoln was as well), the poet of Spoon River has him laughing from the grave:

Like the directory in a cemetery office, the epitaphs are arranged alphabetically in a table of contents by last name in most cases. We won’t find “Dreiser” there, only “Theodore the Poet.” But we will find “Ford, Webster,” who was epitaphed in Reedy’s Mirror on January 15, 1915. As if his art were prescient of his life, ten days later Masters was stricken with a nearly fatal case of pneumonia like that he had inflicted on his fictional self. At the height of his fame in 1916, he was quoted in the Literary Digest of March 4 to say that the strength of his book was “its indifference; its impartiality; its tolerance; its refusal to label sheep and goats; its determinations that their men and women shall tell their own story, confess their own crime and conviction, assert without approval or blame. The author knows that the truth is never known, or never told, unless the dead can speak.” This expresses the spirit of literary naturalism; it creates a world in which human beings are without free will, and only have choices predetermined by circumstance. Spoon River Anthology may be likened to Dante’s Infernostripped of religious or moral structure. Masters seriously hesitated to reveal himself as the author for fear of hurting his reputation as a lawyer. His fears came true, even though after the literary success he was less and less interested in practicing law, a profession that he often said he hated. He even—at Reedy’s suggestion—dedicated his book to his first wife, yet another ruse by the author who claimed to tell the naked truth.

Edgar Lee Masters stood in the front ranks of American literature early in the twentieth century in two important ways. First, he carried the mantle of Whitman in poetry, and second, he became our first major writer of psychological naturalism, which culminates in the works of such great American writers as Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy, Richard Wright in Native Son, and William Faulkner in his deeply tormented tales of the South in the wake of the Civil War. Spoon River Anthology, Masters’s great naturalistic work, deserves to be read anew and welcomed back into the canon of major American poetry.

—JEROME LOVING

Suggestions for Further Reading

Duffey, Bernard. The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1954.

Flanagan, John T. Edgar Lee Masters: The Spoon River Poet and His Critics. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974.

Hilfer, Anthony. The Revolt from the Village, 1915-1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969.

Loving, Jerome. The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Masters, Edgar Lee. Across Spoon River. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1936.

———. Doomsday Book. New York: Macmillan, 1920.

———. Lincoln: The Man. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1931.

———. Living Thoughts of Emerson. New York: Longmans, Green, 1940.

———. Mark Twain: A Portrait. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938.

———. Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935.

———. Whitman. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937.

Masters, Hilary. Last Stands: Notes from Memory. Boston: David Godine, 1982.

Primeau, Ronald. Beyond Spoon River: The Legacy of Edgar Lee Masters. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Robinson, Frank K. Edgar Lee Masters: An Exhibition in Commemorationof the Centenary of His Birth. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970.

Russell, Herbert K. Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Spoon River Anthology: An Annotated Edition, ed.