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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
THE HILL*
HOD PUTT*
OLLIE MCGEE
FLETCHER MCGEE
ROBERT FULTON TANNER
CASSIUS HUEFFER
SEREPTA MASON*
AMANDA BARKER
CONSTANCE HATELY
CHASE HENRY
HARRY CAREY GOODHUE
JUDGE SOMERS
KINSEY KEENE
BENJAMIN PANTIER
MRS. BENJAMIN PANTIER
REUBEN PANTIER
EMILY SPARKS
TRAINOR, THE DRUGGIST
DAISY FRASER
BENJAMIN FRASER
MINERVA JONES
“INDIGNATION” JONES
DOCTOR MEYERS
MRS. MEYERS*
"BUTCH” WELDY
KNOWLT HOHEIMER
LYDIA PUCKETT
FRANK DRUMMER
HARE DRUMMER
CONRAD SIEVER
DOC HILL
ANDY THE NIGHT-WATCH
SARAH BROWN
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
FLOSSIE CABANIS
JULIA MILLER
JOHNNIE SAYRE
CHARLIE FRENCH
ZENAS WITT
THEODORE THE POET*
THE TOWN MARSHAL
JACK MCGUIRE
DORCAS GUSTINE
NICHOLAS BINDLE
JACOB GOODPASTURE
HAROLD ARNETT
MARGARET FULLER SLACK
GEORGE TRIMBLE
DR. SIEGRFIED ISEMAN
“ACE” SHAW*
LOIS SPEARS
JUSTICE ARNETT
WILLARD FLUKE
ANER CLUTE
LUCIUS ATHERTON
HOMER CLAPP
DEACON TAYLOR
SAM HOOKEY
COONEY POTTER
FIDDLER JONES
NELLIE CLARK
LOUISE SMITH
HERBERT MARSHALL
GEORGE GRAY
HON. HENRY BENNETT
GRIFFY THE COOPER
SERSMITH THE DENTIST
A. D. BLOOD
ROBERT SOUTHEY BURKE
DORA WILLIAMS
MRS. WILLIAMS
WILLIAM AND EMILY
THE CIRCUIT JUDGE
BLIND JACK
JOHN HORACE BURLESON
NANCY KNAPP
BARRY HOLDEN
STATE’S ATTORNEY FALLAS
WENDELL P. BLOYD
FRANCIS TURNER
FRANKLIN JONES
JOHN M. CHURCH
RUSSIAN SONIA
ISA NUTTER
BARNEY HAINSFEATHER
PETIT, THE POET
PAULINE BARRETT
MRS. CHARLES BLISS
MRS. GEORGE REECE
REV. LEMUEL WILEY
THOMAS ROSS, JR.
REV. ABNER PEET
JEFFERSON HOWARD
JUDGE SELAH LIVELY
ALBERT SCHIRDING
JONAS KEENE
EUGENIA TODD
YEE BOW
WASHINGTON MCNEELY
PAUL MCNEELY
MARY MCNEELY
DANIEL M’CUMBER
GEORGINE SAND MINER
THOMAS RHODES*
IDA CHICKEN
PENNIWIT, THE ARTIST
JIM BROWN
ROBERT DAVIDSON
ELSA WERTMAN
HAMILTON GREENE
ERNEST HYDE
ROGER HESTON
AMOS SIBLEY*
MRS. SIBLEY
ADAM WEIRAUCH
EZRA BARTLETT
AMELIA GARRICK
JOHN HANCOCK OTIS
ANTHONY FINDLAY
JOHN CABANIS
THE UNKNOWN
ALEXANDER THROCKMORTON
JONATHAN SWIFT SOMERS*
WIDOW MCFARLANE
CARL HAMBLIN
EDITOR WHEDON
EUGENE CARMAN
CLARENCE FAWCETT
W. LLOYD GARRISON STANDARD
PROFESSOR NEWCOMER
RALPH RHODES
MICKEY M’GREW
ROSIE ROBERTS
OSCAR HUMMEL
ROSCOE PURKAPILE
MRS. PURKAPILE
JOSIAH TOMPKINS
MRS. KESSLER
HARMON WHITNEY
BERT KESSLER
LAMBERT HUTCHINS
LILLIAN STEWART
HORTENSE ROBBINS
BATTERTON DOBYNS
JACOB GODBEY
WALTER SIMMONS
TOM BEATTY
ROY BUTLER
SEARCY FOOTE
EDMUND POLLARD
THOMAS TREVELYAN
PERCIVAL SHARP
HIRAM SCATES
PELEG POAGUE
JEDUTHAN HAWLEY
ABEL MELVENY
OAKS TUTT
ELLIOTT HAWKINS
VOLTAIRE JOHNSON
ENGLISH THORNTON
ENOCH DUNLAP
IDA FRICKEY
SETH COMPTON
FELIX SCHMIDT
SCHRŒDER THE FISHERMAN
RICHARD BONE
SILAS DEMENT
DILLARD SISSMAN
JONATHAN HOUGHTON
E. C. CULBERTSON
SHACK DYE
HILDRUP TUBBS
HENRY TRIPP
GRANVILLE CALHOUN
HENRY C. CALHOUN
ALFRED MOIR
PERRY ZOLL
DIPPOLD THE OPTICIAN
MAGRADY GRAHAM
ARCHIBALD HIGBIE
TOM MERRITT
MRS. MERRITT
ELMER KARR
ELIZABETH CHILDERS
EDITH CONANT
CHARLES WEBSTER
FATHER MALLOY
AMI GREEN
CALVIN CAMPBELL
HENRY LAYTON
HARLAN SEWALL
IPPOLIT KONOVALOFF
HENRY PHIPPS
HARRY WILMANS
JOHN WASSON
MANY SOLDIERS
GODWIN JAMES
LYMAN KING
CAROLINE BRANSON
ANNE RUTLEDGE
HAMLET MICURE
MABEL OSBORNE
WILLIAM H. HERNDON*
REBECCA WASSON
RUTHERFORD MCDOWELL
HANNAH ARMSTRONG
LUCINDA MATLOCK
DAVIS MATLOCK
HERMAN ALTMAN
JENNIE M’GREW
COLUMBUS CHENEY
WALLACE FERGUSON
MARIE BATESON
TENNESSEE CLAFLIN SHOPE
PLYMOUTH ROCK JOE
IMANUEL EHRENHARDT*
SAMUEL GARDNER
DOW KRITT
WILLIAM JONES
WILLIAM GOODE
J. MILTON MILES
FAITH MATHENY
SCHOLFIELD HURLEY
WILLIE METCALF
WILLIE PENNINGTON
THE VILLAGE ATHEIST
JOHN BALLARD
JULIAN SCOTT
ALFONZO CHURCHILL
ZILPHA MARSH
JAMES GARBER
LYDIA HUMPHREY
LE ROY GOLDMAN
GUSTAV RICHTER
ARLO WILL
CAPTAIN ORLANDO KILLION
JEREMY CARLISLE
JOSEPH DIXON
JUDSON STODDARD
RUSSELL KINCAID
AARON HATFIELD
ISAIAH BEETHOVEN
ELIJAH BROWNING
WEBSTER FORD*
THE SPOONIAD
EPILOGUE
Explanatory Notes
SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY
EDGAR LEE MASTERS was born in 1868 in Garnett, Kansas, and grew up in the western Illinois
farmlands where his grandparents had settled in the 1820s. He attended Knox College for one year,
after which he relocated to Chicago. There he entered into a law partnership that eventually included
Clarence Darrow. During the late 1890s, he began writing a series of essays and plays under the
pseudonym Dexter Wallace. In 1915, he published his major work, the Spoon River Anthology, named
after the picturesque landscape near his home. This collection was met with much acclaim and
honored with several literary awards, including the Poetry Society of America Medal, the Shelley
Memorial Award, and the Academy of American Poets fellowship. Masters followed up Spoon River
Anthology with several other, lesser known collections of poems, namely The Great Valley (1916),
Toward the Gulf (1918), Starved Rock (1919), The Open Sea (1921), The New Spoon River (1924),
Selected Poems (1925), Poems of People (1936), and More People (1939). Later in life, Masters also
tried his hand at fiction and biography, penning the novel Mitch Miller (1920) and biographies
Whitman (1937) and the controversial Lincoln: The Man (1931), in addition to Mark Twain: A Portrait
(1938). He died in 1950 in Melrose, Pennsylvania, and is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg,
Illinois.
JEROME LOVING, a recipient of the Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities
fellowships for biography, is Distinguished Professor of English at Texas A&M University. His
previous publications include Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story; Walt Whitman: The
Song of Himself; and The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser.
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First published in the United States of America by The Macmillan Company 1915
This edition with an introduction and notes by Jerome Loving published in Penguin Books 2008
Introduction and notes copyright © Jerome Loving, 2008
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Masters, Edgar Lee, 1868-1950.
Spoon River anthology / Edgar Lee Masters ; introduction and notes by Jerome Loving.
p. cm.
“First published in the United States of America by The Macmillan Company 1915.”
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-4406-3529-8
1. Loving, Jerome, 1941- II. Title.
PS3525.A83S5 2008
811’.52—dc22 2008003519
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ed Folsom, Hilary Masters, J. Lawrence Mitchell, and Paul Christensen for
reading a draft of my introduction and making helpful suggestions.
Introduction
In the summer of 1915, Theodore Dreiser held a reception for Edgar Lee Masters at his Greenwich
Village apartment. The two writers had known each other for at least three years. Dreiser, the “Father
of American Realism” (or at least naturalism), was already famous for five or six books, most notably
Sister Carrie, which in 1900 set the stage for novels and poetry that would envision life as a biological
trap. Dreiser had blazed the trail in fiction that Masters followed in poetry. Indeed, by that summer the
Chicago lawyer and former partner with Clarence Darrow was possibly more famous than the great
Dreiser. Spoon River Anthology (1915) immediately became a huge literary splash. Its sales for the
next three or four years made it America’s all-time best-seller for a serious book of poems.
Ever since the short poems began appearing in 1914 in the St. Louis weekly Reedy’s Mirror , the
excitement about this new poet had been mounting. By the time it reached book form in the spring of
1915, Spoon River had gone through seven printings in the same number of months. “At last,” Ezra
Pound announced from England in the Egoist, “America has discovered a poet.” He ranked Masters
with T. S. Eliot, who had recently published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” On March 4,
1914, the Literary Digestwrote: “Not since the British discovered Walt Whitman for America and
blamed us for our in-appreciation, has an American literary sensation struck England with the impact
of ‘Spoon River Anthology.’”
The Spoon River poems initially appeared under the pseudonym Webster Ford. Masters, steeped in
English literature as well as the Roman and Greek classics, had combined the surnames of two major
dramatists of the English Renaissance known for their tragic themes: John Webster and John Ford.
Now all the world knew the true identity of the author of the famous Spoon River epitaphs, lapidary, or
tombstone verse that may have been inspired in part by such nineteenth-century works as E. W.
Howe’s The Story of a Country Town (1883) and Mark Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg” (1899), stories that suggested the hypocrisy and superficiality of a small-town
environment. On the other side of the spectrum, Spoon River Anthology, with its theme of the buried
life, would open the way to such penetrating psychological works in the twentieth century as
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920), and Thornton
Wilder’s Our Town (1938), the principal monuments of a phase of American fiction known as “The
Revolt from the Village” (1915-30). 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 neoConfederate 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). 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. And while today Masters
is no longer considered Whitman’s literary equal, he is in fact just as important as a literary innovator.
Whereas Whitman, in the words of Ezra Pound, “broke the new wood” of poetry by writing about the
miracle of the common in free verse, Masters opened up the naturalistic tradition in American
literature. Indeed, it is Masters instead of Sherwood Anderson who was the first American writer to
introduce psychological naturalism. In the earlier form of naturalism, adversity comes from external
forces such as poverty, crime, or sickness, whereas in psychological naturalism the enemy is as much
within as without, indeed more so.
As the village or small town began to reappear in American literature, whether as Spoon River or
Winesburg, it was no longer viewed as a refuge from the brute external forces found in the city. The
voices that speak in Spoon River Anthology describe themselves as victims of their own hunger for life
and its consequences. “There are two hundred and forty-four characters in the book . . . nineteen
stories developed by interrelated portraits,” Masters wrote in “The Genesis of Spoon River.”
“Practically every human occupation is covered.” He anticipated works featuring the revolt from the
village, not only in Lewis’s Main Street but Anderson’s Winesburg,Ohio , where Doc Reefy in “Paper
Pills” is clearly anticipated by Masters’s “Doc Hill,” based in part on the Masterses’ family physician.
Wilder’s play Our Town not only takes the idea of the living dead directly from Spoon River
Anthology, but borrows a line from “Lucinda Matlock” and credits Masters not by name but as merely
“one of those Middle West poets.”
“I am robbed all the time,” the aging poet complained to Gerald Sanders, a would-be compiler of
his primary bibliography at Eastern Michigan College, in 1941. By this time Masters had already
given his all for poetry (and the accompanying ego). He had divorced his first wife, moved
permanently to New York City in 1923, married a woman thirty years his junior the following year,
sired a son (the writer Hilary Masters) by her in 1928, and lived a nearly hand-to-mouth existence at
the Chelsea, then a cheap residential hotel for artists and writers at 222 West Twenty-third Street in
New York. By this time he had become, or resembled, one of the vanquished in his Spoon River
Anthology. In one of the final epitaphs of “Webster Ford,” he had alluded to the challenges of heredity
and environment—“When I seemed to be turned to a tree with trunk and branches / Growing indurate,
turning to stone, yet burgeoning[.]” He was eking out an existence from his writing, never coming
close to his earlier economic success in literature (not to mention the law) except for the brief
popularity of The New Spoon River in 1924. Spoon River Anthology, the play based on the 1915 work
that continues to be performed by high school and college thespians today, did not debut on Broadway
until the late 1960s, long after Masters’s death.
By the beginning of World War II, Masters had been eclipsed by such contemporary poets as Edwin
Arlington Robinson and especially Robert Frost, whose first three books had originally been
overshadowed by Spoon River Anthology. Masters came to despise Louis Untermeyer, an editor of
poetry anthologies and a minor poet who vigorously promoted Frost over Masters. Masters believed
that most Eastern poets were in a natural conspiracy against the bards of the Midwest. He had become
embittered at the decline of his reputation and saddened at the lack of collegiality he expected from
fellow poets, something he himself didn’t always extend to others. He thought he would be welcomed
into the parliament of poets that Keats and Shelley wrote about, his son told this writer in 2006, but he
found ultimately only “ridicule and frosty responses.” “I have done nothing in my life that was not a
service in the devotion to Apollo,” Masters told a friend in the 1920s, “since I was seventeen years of
age.”
Hilary Masters, his last son, has written eloquently in Last Stands, a family memoir that has been
called “something of a miniature Spoon River,” of his life growing up with the aging poet and his
second wife, Ellen Coyne. Sixty when he became a father for the fourth time, Masters seldom saw his
son afterward except in the summer when young Hilary was brought East from his maternal
grandparents’ home in Kansas City. When the boy was eight years old, his father wrote him, “Perhaps,
and this hurts, I should have given up writing, and devoted my time to you. That might have been a
contribution to America better than I have made by isolating myself to do it. Who knows?” By this
time, this “one-book author,” as he has been called, was the author of forty-four volumes. He wrote in
every genre, even children’s literature in Mitch Miller (1920), the story about a boyhood friend who
was killed while trying to hitch a ride on a train.
His autobiography, Across Spoon River, finally appeared in 1937, but most of it had been written in
the 1920s and held back because of a lack of a publisher. Finally, Ellen Coyne helped prepare a copy
that was publishable in the sense of not being too exact in its use of names and other details that might
embarrass people still living. (In fact, Clarence Darrow, who was Masters’s law partner from 1903 to
1911, is never mentioned by name because the two became bitter enemies after Darrow served as the
divorce lawyer for Helen Jenkins Masters.) The story it presents concludes in 1917, and in one way the
life—the literary life—of Edgar Lee Masters came to an effective close at that point, at least in terms
of any critical success approaching the magnitude of Spoon River Anthology. Nonetheless, he
continued to produce a volume almost every year of his life. Masters wrote easily and eloquently, but
unfortunately he wrote too fast—composing Mitch Miller, for example, in just under two weeks. He
had also written Spoon River quickly (and the uneven quality is apparent even there), but the
originality of those poems was now missing. Ironically, he had taken much more care in preparing his
legal briefs, knowing perhaps that they would fall under heavier scrutiny than his more subjective
literary work.
Edgar Lee Masters also wrote four biographies of American writers, two of which were warm
appreciations of the figures and two of which were attacks. The subjects were (in the order of
discussion) Vachel Lindsay, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and Mark Twain. 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. 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:
And now, you world-savers, who reaped nothing in life
And in death have neither stones nor epitaphs,
How do you like your silence from mouths stopped
With the dust of my triumphant career?
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. John E. Hallwas. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1922.
N.B.: The largest collection of the papers of Edgar Lee Masters is housed in the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
A Note on the Text
The Penguin text is based upon the augmented edition of 1916, published by Macmillan Company. It
contains 245 poems and the “Epilogue.” The original poems of Spoon River Anthology contained only
214 pieces. These were published weekly in Reedy’s Mirror in St. Louis in 1914 and 1915. Masters
wrote the additional thirty-one poems and epigraph in the summer and fall of 1915 in preparation for
the Macmillan edition.