Author Publication date April 1915 Playwright Edgar Lee Masters | Language English Originally published April 1915 Genre Poetry Country United States of America | |
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Characters Minerva Jones, Benjamin Pantier, Doctor Meyers Similar Our Town, The Waste Land, Death of a Salesman | ||
Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short, free verse poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town. The aim of the poems is to demystify the rural, small town American life. The collection includes two hundred and twelve separate characters, all providing two-hundred forty-four accounts of their lives, losses, and manner of death. Many of the poems contain cross-references that create an unabashed tapestry of the community. The poems were originally published in the magazine Reedy's Mirror.
Contents
Spoon river anthology
Content
The first poem serves as an introduction:
"The Hill"
Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all are sleeping on the hill.
One passed in a fever,
One was burned in a mine,
One was killed in a brawl,
One died in a jail,
One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?—
All, all are sleeping on the hill.
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—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked
With venerable men of the revolution?—
All, all are sleeping on the hill.
They brought them dead sons from the war,
And daughters whom life had crushed,
And their children fatherless, crying—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where is Old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove,
Of what Abe Lincoln said
One time at Springfield.
Each following poem is an autobiographical epitaph of a dead citizen, delivered by the dead themselves. They speak about the sorts of things one might expect: some recite their histories and turning points, others make observations of life from the outside, and petty ones complain of the treatment of their graves, while few tell how they really died. Speaking without reason to lie or fear the consequences, they construct a picture of life in their town that is shorn of façades. The interplay of various villagers — e.g. a bright and successful man crediting his parents for all he's accomplished, and an old woman weeping because he is secretly her illegitimate child — forms a gripping, if not pretty, whole.
The subject of afterlife receives only the occasional brief mention, and even those seem to be contradictory.
The work features such characters as Tom Merritt, Amos Sibley, Carl Hamblin, Fiddler Jones and A.D. Blood. Many of the characters who make appearances in Spoon River Anthology were based on real people that Masters knew or heard of in the two towns in which he grew up, Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois. Most notable is Ann Rutledge, regarded in local legend to be Abraham Lincoln's early love interest though there is no actual proof of such a relationship. Rutledge's grave can still be found in a Petersburg cemetery, and a tour of graveyards in both towns, especially Oak Hill Cemetery, reveals most of the surnames that Masters applied to his characters.
Other local legends assert that Masters' fictional portrayal of local residents, often in unflattering light, created a lot of embarrassment and aggravation in his hometown. This is offered as an explanation for why he chose not to settle down in Lewistown or Petersburg.
Spoon River Anthology is often used in second year characterization work in the Meisner technique of actor training.
Publication History
Spoon River Anthology was originally published in serial form in the St. Louis-based literary magazine, Reedy's Mirror from May 29, 1914 until January 5, 1915. The poems were attributed initially to the pseudonym Webster Ford. William Marion Reedy, owner, publisher and editor of the magazine revealed the poems’ true authorship in November 1914, after 21 weekly entries.
Masters credited Reedy with introducing him to the Greek Anthology, a collection of classical period epigrams, which Spoon River Anthology is similarly modeled in style. Masters wrote that Reedy, through his criticism and friendship, encouraged him to write “something more distinctive than what I was doing, somehow, someway, but without telling me how to do it.”
The first book edition of Spoon River Anthology was published by The Macmillan Company in 1915 with a total of two-hundred and nine poems. Masters added thirty-five new poems in the 1916 addition, expanding on new characters with connections to some of the originals. Among those poems, "Andy the Night-Watch", "Isa Nutter," "Plymouth Rock Joe," and "The Epilogue" were included in the new edition.