Spoon River Anthology

A wonderful set of monologues written from the perspectives of the deceased citizens of Spoon River.

It's wonderful that a new volume of the Spoon River Anthology has been published after many years. The print is excellent, the size is perfect (a trade paperback.) Edgar Lee Masters' characterizations are timeless, insightful, and beautifully written.

There is no Spoon River, IL. Check your map. Several towns argue that they stake their claim in being what Masters asserted to be this mythical town. Petersburg and Lewistown, two towns of otherwise minor repute seem closest... but it is so much better we haven't an actual town... Spoon River's residents are our next door neighbors, whether we live in Central Illinois or Central Florida, or southern Alaska. Masters has written not fables, but the essence of American life. He hasn't captured the life and times of 1915, but has instead recorded in 1915 the life and times of our present day America. The same reason the paintings of Norman Rockwell makes sense is why Edgar Lee Masters poetry makes sense. To read the quick messages on the gravestone of one man, learning a little bit him, and something about a neighbor or two, we can learn a little about how we live in communities today. Our lives, like Jimmy Stewart's character in "It's a Wonderful Life" found out, interact and impact everyone we meet. Who we love, who we should love and who we reject. And when we die, others feel the loss. Masters has aptly put this in a humorous, yet insightful way into short verses. The poems don't rhyme. The meter is not solid, and the poetics aren't intricate. They aren't poems like Poe's or Dickinson, not in the way they wrote American poems. Don't expect iambic pentameter-based sonnets or villanelles. Expect a conversation, and listen in. The poetry here is in the subtle use of social nuance. In the nuances are his insight and wit. Two readings will bring to light what you miss in the first. Buy this book, read it slow. It reads faster than most poetry book, but don't get caught in the temptation to zoom through each poem just because you can. After you read it, see the play if it happens to be performed in your town. I fully recommend it. Anthony Trendl editor, HungarianBookstore.com

Spoon River Anthology is an American Classic. It has touched me since my grandfather read parts of it to me more than thirty years ago. Ostensibly it is a collection of autobiographical poems of the silent inhabitants of the town's graveyard. The broad theme, the book's strategy, is the great sweep of what America was like in the nineteenth century. The stories of their lives; joys and sorrows, successes and failures, loves and hates, and secrets of those people in the graveyard are the tactics. Above all, E.L. Masters exposes the hypocrisy and denial in which people have always lived their lives. Even today, in a much worldlier time than the turn of the century when it was written, the brutal honesty of the citizens shakes our complacency. This is no mellow reflection on the good old days. Its citizens corrupt and are corrupted. They suffer loveless marriages. Men run away to war to escape jail or rejection in love, women suffer stifling lack of opportunity and equality. The citizens die in childbirth or from lockjaw contracted from a cut by a rusty knife. Yet in reading about these lives we understand a little more about what it is to be human. None of us could fail to find some stories that in ways match ours to a greater or lesser extent. An in doing so, be granted in life the level of insight into ourselves and others that these storytellers achieved only after their lives had ended.