Spoon River Anthology

By Edgar Lee Masters

Originally published in “Reedy’s Mirror” from May 29, 1914 until January 5, 1915 and then first in book form in 1915 with an expanded edition in 1916, “Spoon River Anthology” is a collection of poetry inspired by the tombstones of the dead in a small rural American town. There is no real Spoon River as the entire town and its inhabitants are fictional but much of the town and its deceased occupants are based in part on Masters’ own childhood growing up in small towns in Illinois. “Spoon River Anthology” is Edgar Lee Masters’ masterpiece, a collection of poetry that weaves a tapestry of the lives of a group of small-town Americans, which taken together reads like a novel critiquing the notion of the idyllic rural American life. A critical and financial success from its first publication, “Spoon River Anthology” is a truly original work of American literature, the likes of which there has not been before or since. This edition follows the expanded 1916 edition with its additional thirty-five poems, “The Spooniad”, and the epilogue; includes an introduction by May Swenson; and a biographical afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Dec 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781420956740

Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar LeeMasters (1868–1950) was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. Born in Garnett, Kansas to attorney Hardin Wallace Masters and Emma Jerusha Dexter, they later moved to Lewistown, Illinois, where Masters attended high school and had his first publication in the Chicago Daily News. After working in his father’s law office, he was admitted to the Illinois State Bar and moved to Chicago. In 1898 he married Helen M. Jenkins and had three children. Masters died on March 5, 1950, in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, at the age of eighty-one. He is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois.

Book preview

cover.jpg

SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY

By EDGAR LEE MASTERS

Introduction by MAY SWENSON

Spoon River Anthology

By Edgar Lee Masters

Introduction by May Swenson

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-6133-1

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5674-0

This edition copyright © 2019. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of Churchyard with Ruined Chapel (oil on board), by John Teasdale (1848-1926) / Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear, UK / © Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums / Bridgeman Images.

Please visit www.digireads.com

CONTENTS

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. Siegfried 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

Sexsmith 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

Schroeder 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

Immanuel Ehrenhardt

Samuel Gardner

Dow Kritt

William Jones

William Goode

J. Milton Miles

Faith Matheny

Scholfield Huxley

Willie Metcalf

Willie Pennington

The Village Atheist

John Ballard

Julian Scott

Alfonso 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

Biographical Afterword

Introduction

Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology was the first thing of its kind and a phenomenon in American literature when it appeared in 1915. It is not less so today. Originally conceived as a novel, having the ingredients of a fatalistic drama as well as those of a tract on social injustice, the Anthology is a series of poetic monologues by 244 former inhabitants (both real and imagined) of Spoon River, an area near Lewistown and Petersburg, Illinois, where Masters spent much of his boyhood. All in the cast are dead—all, all are sleeping on the hill of a Midwestern cemetery—and from their graves they speak their own epitaphs, discovering and confessing the real motivations of their lives; they reveal the secret steps that stumbled them to failure, or raised them to illusionary triumphs while alive; it is as if the darkness of the grave granted them revelatory eyes for a recognition of their own souls.

Masters’ conceptual frame for the work was as startling to American readers of the time as was his form—a blunt free verse considered graceless by many of his critics. The scandalous behavior of some of his characters, several of whom, under disguised names, were recognizable as influential figures lately dead or still living in the region, caused the book to become a notorious success—in fact, the first edition made more money for its author and its publisher than any previous volume of American poetry.

Born in Garnett, Kansas in 1868, Masters was in his middle forties when he began the Anthology. He had published eleven books of verse, plays and essays without gaining attention. Later evaluators agreed that his early work reflected a too obvious and energetic worship of Keats, Shelley, Milton, Swinburne and Whitman. He was to see published a total of over fifty volumes—of poetry, fiction, biography, drama—before he died in 1950, none of them up to the mark of the Anthology. With the encouragement of his publishers, Masters attempted a sequel to his masterpiece, and The New Spoon River appeared in 1924; it pictured the community as metropolized; although called a failure by many critics, it, too, was a best seller.

With Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, Masters forms the third pillar of the poetic renaissance as it arose in the Middle West during the second decade of the twentieth century, Chicago being the focus point. Masters spent a year at Knox College, where he studied Greek, after which he read law in his father’s office. He was admitted to the bar in 1891 and practiced law for nearly thirty years in Chicago. In contrast to Sandburg, who found his poetic materials there, Masters hated the city, distrusting its decadent influences. Believing in agrarianism as the only healthy way of life, he would have dismissed urbanization from the earth, had he been able. Because his character encompassed a curious blend of the psychologist, the muckraker and reformer with the dramatist, poet and intellectual, and because of his law experience and ardent interest in political and economic issues, Masters was constantly faced in his writings with the task of reconciling conflicting impulses. He was acutely aware of the tragic weaknesses in human beings, the ironic contrasts between their ideals and their actions, and he was constantly angered at injustice, exploitation, industrialization. In respect of being born seventeen years before Ezra Pound, he might be called the earliest Angry Man in American Poetry.

In the Spoon River Anthology Masters fortunately found a way to amalgamate his intuitions with biographical facts by presenting, as if on a metaphorical witness stand, the closed cases of the citizens of Spoon River—the obscure and ordinary as well as the prominent, the criminal, the eccentric, the elect—on all of whom life had passed its unexceptional sentence and consigned to the same grassy prison. He has them testify, as if the tombstones had voices, and he defends them clairvoyantly—not against their sins, petty or great, for these they readily confess themselves—but against the inscrutable punishments and inequalities life fixes upon us all.

In his autobiography, Across Spoon River (1924), Masters wrote that the notion behind the Anthology first occurred to him eight years before he began it, and that he planned it to be a long work in prose. Meanwhile, among other things, he was industriously contributing verse to Reedy’s Mirror of St. Louis, and the story goes that one day in 1913 its editor, William M. Reedy, gave him a copy of the Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, suggesting he read it for its realism and compression of style. Subsequently, in the May 29, 1914 issue of Reedy’s Mirror there appeared the first published monologue, The Unknown under the pseudonym Webster Ford, which Masters later placed in the middle of his collection. Actually, the only significant points of convergence between the Greek Epigrams and the Spoon River Anthology are the ironic and extremely objective attitudes given to the characters, and the admirable brevity of the epitaphs.

Ten years after the compilation came out in book form, its author wrote an essay for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury called The Genesis of Spoon River in which he pointed out that of the 244 characters in the book, not counting those who figure in The Spooniad and The Epilogue,

. . . there are nineteen stories developed by interrelated portraits. . . . Practically every ordinary human occupation is covered. . . . When the book was put together in its definitive order, the fools, the drunkards, and the failures came first, the people of one-birth minds got second place, and the heroes and the enlightened spirits came last, a sort of Divine Comedy. . . . The names I drew from both the Spoon River and Sangamon River cemeteries, combining first names here with surnames there, and taking some also from the constitutions and State papers of Illinois.

He might have added that he made up a number of the names, giving suggestive clues to certain personalities in his ghostly cast, or to the attitudes he intends us to take toward them, for instance: Voltaire Johnson, Hamlet Micure, Minerva the Village Poetess with her cock eye and rolling walk . . . John M. Church is an attorney and crook, Georgine Sand Miner is an aggressive and vindictive woman, Ida Chicken a vain and silly one, Silas Dement is an arsonist who gleefully sets fire to the courthouse, Zilpha Marsh is a medium. As one of his noble and enlightened spirits Masters included the epitaph of his grandmother under the pseudonym of Lucinda Matlock. She represents his ideal of the undaunted pioneer woman, who gave birth to twelve children, remained faithful to her husband, and lived to a ripe age.

Although there are a number of upright or modest monuments in his provincial community of the dead, Masters placed most of them at the back of the graveyard, so to speak—that is, toward the end of the book—and, quite naturally, it is the rakish, tumble-down headstones and the hypocritically ostentatious ones that most intrigue us. Hod Putt, robber and murderer lying side by side with his victim, is the first voice in the book. Chase Henry, the village drunkard, congratulates himself on lying beside a banker; Judge Somers bewails the injustice of his neglected grave while the drunkard has a marble stone and urn. Daisy Fraser, a loose but good-hearted woman of the town, (whom her biographer seems rather to admire than deplore) figures in several of the interlocking histories, including that of the arch villain of the drama, Deacon Thomas Rhodes, who ran the church as well as the store and the bank. This portrait of an unscrupulous small town plutocrat, emerging through more than a dozen dead mouths of Rhodes’ various victims, is vividly convincing. Rhodes’ own defiant epitaph, exposing his rock-like egotism even in death, is a good example of Masters’ contempt for the self-centered rich man, abuser of power and economic oppressor. Masters took the opportunity in the Anthology to inveigh against all that he despised—political swindling, graft, veniality, enforced poverty—and at the same time, by implication, to place himself on the liberal side of certain controversial issues of the day such as prohibition, anarchism, women’s rights, free will, free love, membership in The Social Purity Club. He makes Henry Phipps, the Sunday School superintendent, confess his hypocrisy while indicating his (Masters’) own anti-pietistic, pro-social-change philosophy.

There is evidence that he intended us to find facets of himself in certain of his characters; he seems to stand behind the mask of Jefferson Howard—a suggestive name, for Thomas Jefferson was his idol—in the lines of that epitaph which read: Foe of the Church with its charnel darkness, / Friend of the human touch of the tavern . . . Masters hated asceticism, emulated liberalism throughout his life. Nevertheless, in the Spoon River poems he clearly defines a strongly independent moral code. When interviewed by Robert van Gelder in the New York Times in 1942, Masters said: "I am a Hellenist . . . The great marvel