“Spoon River America:” Jason Stacy on the Myth of the Small Town

Reading a book of literary and cultural criticism about a favorite poetry collection led me to understand something about the community I live in. 

Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters (1868 - 1950) was published in 1915; it has the distinction of being one of the few poetry collections that has never been out of print. It’s 212 characters tell their stories of their lives in the fictitious town of Spoon River in 244 poems. Many of the pomes were first published by Reedy’s Mirror, a weekly literary journal published in St. Louis under editor William Marion Reedy. 

 

What was unusual about the collection was how Masters developed and depicted the people of an American Midwest small town. Saints co-existed with sinners; sometimes, saints were sinners and vice versa. The poems read like tombstone epitaphs, as if summing up the life of each Spoon River resident. 

 

The collection was enormously influential, not only in literary and popular culture but in creating a myth of the small town. In Spoon Rover America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town, Jason Stacy persuasively argues that the fictional town of Spoon River supplanted the idea of the New England village in the American mind, that it framed how we understand small town life and how we Americans understand ourselves.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.