Edgar Lee Masters1868-1950

Masters

• Biography

• Reception

• Influences

• Naturalism

• Texts

Masters on Spoon River

As my career as a poet seemed stayed or stopped altogether, I began to dream of writing one book, a book about a country town, but which should have so many characters, and so many threads and patterns in its texture that it would be the story of the whole world. . . . It was never written; instead the Spoon River Anthology was written, as the result of that long incubation, and upon that matter of architecture as it happened.

TheHill

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 brothelOne 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.

Ezra Pound

AT LAST! At last America has discovered a poet.

John Gould Fletcher

Describes the “fierce sincerity” of the poems, “the detailed power of character drawing, the knowledge of American types.”

The poems stirred “literary circles to their depths.”

Lawrence Gilman

The collection has “a novel and arresting verse-form.” Masters should be praised as “the first who has dared” to include certain people. “What Mr. Masters has accomplished is the cinematographing of narrative-verse. . . . “The Spoon River Anthology is a series of vivid, concentrated, rapidly shifting visualizations, related and interwoven, and employing that favorite device of the screen-play: a single event exhibited from different dramatic angles.”

“The Spoon River Anthology prevails—seizes you, engrosses you, haunts you—not because of its verse, but in spite of it. It is often as rank and candid as the records of a police-court; but it is ineluctably detaining, at times extraordinarily moving. It is a miracle of veracious characterization; fiction of an unexampled kind; a new thing under the sun. But why drag in poetry?”

Raymond Alden

• All contemporary verse either follows poetic tradition or it has “the distinctive resolution to be new.” The Spoon River Anthology “might be called the reductio ad absurdum of certain of the new methods—such as the abandonment of conventional form and the fearless scrutiny of disagreeable realities.” The poetry has “a stern virility to which one might warm were it not so deliberately unlovely.” The book is “a really remarkable series of character studies, though the half would be much better than the whole. . . . In two or three of the monologues only is the rhythm of life heard sounding underneath the tragedy—as it always is in actual poetry and real tragedy.” . . . . It is a collection of “formless, blundering, but seriously purposed writing.”

Influences

• “I was the chief influence in my own career.”

• Greek Anthology

• Theodore Dreiser: naturalism

• Carl Sandburg

Naturalism

• People are controlled by their appetites (particularly sexual appetites) in an unfeeling and materialist universe that is far beyond their control.

• Life is a struggle, ending in defeat.• A deterministic and tragic vision of the

world.

Masters & Naturalism

“Commenting on the somewhat pessimistic hue of most of the poems, Masters declared that he had repeatedly refused to color them with a more cheerful tinge, because they were largely true characterizations of real persons and would not be accurate if any different.”

—”The Origin of ‘Spoon River,’”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 29, 1918. p. 21.