Classic Biography: "Edgar Lee Masters" by Herbert Russell

The year 1915 was momentous in the history and development of American poetry and poetry in general. Poetry Magazine published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, launching the era of modernism in poetry. And a number of poems which had been published off and on by William Reedy of Reedy’s Mirror in St. Louis were collected and published under the title of Spoon River Anthology.  

The collection by Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950), a Chicago attorney, rocked the poetry world, the literary world, and even popular culture. The book went through seven printings in seven months. By 1916 (and 19 printings), an augmented edition was published. It was the top-selling poetry book for the next five or six years. 

 

The more than 200 poems written as tombstone epigraphs struck a deep, responsive chord in American culture and among the broad general public. People recognized the characters who emerged from the poems. They weren’t so much types as they were cleverly drawn and succinct summaries of your family members, friends, and neighbors. 

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

Photograph: Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950).

“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.

Reading ‘Spoon River Anthology’ for the Third Time

If you asked who my favorite poet is, I wouldn’t hesitate in my answer: T.S. Eliot. If you asked me my favorite poem or collection of poems, my answer would not be “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or “The Hollow Men” or “Four Quartets.” My answer would be Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950).

I first read Spoon River Anthology in high school, junior year, in fact, the year we all took American literature (paired with American history). Our teacher, Mrs. Prince, was a larger-than-life character who spoke in breathless superlatives and occasional exuberant shouts. She told us that Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls was the greatest American novel ever written; it had been published the previous year.

She loved American literature, however, and she was rather wildly enthusiastic about Huckleberry Finn (apparently is was almost as good as Valley of the Dolls) and Walt Whitman. But when she introduced us to the Realists (Edith Wharton, Jack London, Willa Cather) and the early Modernist poets (Eliot, Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, and others), I believe I fell in love with literature.

We read parts of Spoon River Anthology, that collection of more than 200 tombstone inscriptions, aloud in class. I read the whole work for a research paper. I was enthralled. The class even attended a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which seemed to me a dramatic version of Spoon River Anthology.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetspeakPoetry.

Top Photograph: Edgar Lee Masters