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. PENGUIN BOOKS Published by Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registred Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England 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 The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. http://us.penguingroup.com 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.
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