Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
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. SIEGRFIED 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
SERSMITH THE DENTIST
A. D. BLOOD
ROBERT SOUTHEY BURKE
DORA WILLIAMS
MRS. WILLIAMS
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
SCHRŒDER 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
IMANUEL EHRENHARDT*
SAMUEL GARDNER
DOW KRITT
WILLIAM JONES
WILLIAM GOODE
J. MILTON MILES
FAITH MATHENY
SCHOLFIELD HURLEY
WILLIE METCALF
THE VILLAGE ATHEIST
JOHN BALLARD
JULIAN SCOTT
ALFONZO 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
Explanatory Notes
SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY
EDGAR LEE MASTERS
was born in 1868 in Garnett, Kansas, and grew up in the western Illinois farmlands where his grandparents had settled in the 1820s. He attended Knox College for one year, after which he relocated to Chicago. There he entered into a law partnership that eventually included Clarence Darrow. During the late 1890s, he began writing a series of essays and plays under the pseudonym Dexter Wallace. In 1915, he published his major work, the Spoon River Anthology, named after the picturesque landscape near his home. This collection was met with much acclaim and honored with several literary awards, including the Poetry Society of America Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Academy of American Poets fellowship. Masters followed up Spoon River Anthology with several other, lesser known collections of poems, namely The Great Valley (1916), Toward the Gulf (1918), Starved Rock (1919), The Open Sea (1921), The New Spoon River (1924), Selected Poems (1925), Poems of People (1936), and More People (1939). Later in life, Masters also tried his hand at fiction and biography, penning the novel Mitch Miller (1920) and biographies Whitman (1937) and the controversial Lincoln: The Man (1931), in addition to Mark Twain: A Portrait (1938). He died in 1950 in Melrose, Pennsylvania, and is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois.
JEROME LOVING, a recipient of the Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships for biography, is Distinguished Professor of English at Texas A&M University. His previous publications include Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story; Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself; and The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser.
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First published in the United States of America by The Macmillan Company 1915
This edition with an introduction and notes by Jerome Loving published in Penguin Books 2008
Introduction and notes copyright © Jerome Loving, 2008
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Masters, Edgar Lee, 1868-1950.
Spoon River anthology / Edgar Lee Masters ; introduction and notes by Jerome Loving.
p. cm.
“First published in the United States of America by The Macmillan Company 1915.”
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-0-143-10515-2
1. Loving, Jerome, 1941- II. Title.
PS3525.A83S5 2008
811’.52—dc22 2008003519
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ed Folsom, Hilary Masters, J. Lawrence Mitchell, and Paul Christensen for reading a draft of my introduction and making helpful suggestions.
Introduction
In the summer of 1915, Theodore Dreiser held a reception for Edgar Lee Masters at his Greenwich Village apartment. The two writers had known each other for at least three years. Dreiser, the “Father of American Realism” (or at least naturalism), was already famous for five or six books, most notably Sister Carrie, which in 1900 set the stage for novels and poetry that would envision life as a biological trap. Dreiser had blazed the trail in fiction that Masters followed in poetry. Indeed, by that summer the Chicago lawyer and former partner with Clarence Darrow was possibly more famous than the great Dreiser. Spoon River Anthology (1915) immediately became a huge literary splash. Its sales for the next three or four years made it America’s all-time best-seller for a serious book of poems.
Ever since the short poems began appearing in 1914 in the St. Louis weekly Reedy’s Mirror, the excitement about this new poet had been mounting. By the time it reached book form in the spring of 1915, Spoon River had gone through seven printings in the same number of months. “At last,” Ezra Pound announced from England in the Egoist, “America has discovered a poet.” He ranked Masters with T. S. Eliot, who had recently published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” On March 4, 1914, the Literary Digestwrote: “Not since the British discovered Walt Whitman for America and blamed us for our in-appreciation, has an American literary sensation struck England with the impact of ‘Spoon River Anthology.’”
The Spoon River poems initially appeared under the pseudonym Webster Ford. Masters, steeped in English literature as well as the Roman and Greek classics, had combined the surnames of two major dramatists of the English Renaissance known for their tragic themes: John Webster and John Ford. Now all the world knew the true identity of the author of the famous Spoon River epitaphs, lapidary, or tombstone verse that may have been inspired in part by such nineteenth-century works as E. W. Howe’s The Story of a Country Town (1883) and Mark Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899), stories that suggested the hypocrisy and superficiality of a small-town environment. On the other side of the spectrum, Spoon River Anthology, with its theme of the buried life, would open the way to such penetrating psychological works in the twentieth century as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920), and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), the principal monuments of a phase of American fiction known as “The Revolt from the Village” (1915-30). Now the previously sacrosanct village or small-town life is depicted as no better than life in the immoral and indifferent city. The characters’ voices in Spoon River Anthology speak from the grave about their tormented and twisted lives— illicit love affairs, betrayed confidences, political corruption, and miserable marriages. As much the result of the author’s own pessimistic view of life as any factually based record, Masters’s book sums up the life of a small town’s residents who simply know too much about one another and burn eternally, like the flickering souls in Dante’s Inferno.
There were a number of literary celebrities at Dreiser’s place that day in the summer of 1915, including many who are now as nearly as forgotten or out of fashion as Masters himself. There was, for example, the English novelist John Cowper Powys, who called Masters “the new Chaucer.” Dreiser himself compared the forty-five-year-old Masters to Walt Whitman, a view that was then widely held. Dreiser’s naturalistic fiction had exerted a strong influence on Masters. In 1912, he told the novelist after reading The Financier that he thought no one else understood the facts of American life more than Dreiser did. Masters even included Dreiser in his Spoon River Anthology under “Theodore the Poet,” who as a boy had waited patiently for crawfish to come out of their burrows on “the turbid Spoon”:
But later your vision watched for men and women
Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities,
Looking for the souls of them to come out,
So that you could see
How they lived, and for what[.]
Dreiser occupied a unique place
in this collection of portraits arranged in a manner after The Greek Anthology, a collection of short poems in the first person (a technique recommended by his editor at the time, William Marion Reedy). For one thing, he is not dead. And, if the characters are also observers of life, they observe their own failures in life, their frustrations and their painful shortcomings, unlike Theodore the Poet.
Masters had written rhymed and metered verse in his first twelve books of poetry, plays, and political essays. Taking his title from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, he called his first volume of poems A Book of Verse in 1898. This was followed by another volume of conventional poems under the title of The Blood of the Prophets in 1905, but a year earlier he had tried his hand with political essays in The New Star Chamber and Other Essays. His early attempts in literature also included at least two verse plays. One, according to Herbert K. Russell, his only biographer, was entitled Benedict Arnold, which appeared around 1898. Another play, also radical in thought, was called Maximillian(1905); it contained a veiled complaint about America’s foreign policies in the Philippines. A year or two later, Masters turned to writing short verse plays, which he printed privately and tried unsuccessfully to get produced. These included Althea (1907), The Trifler (1908), and The Leaves of the Tree (1909), and their themes anticipated Spoon River Anthology in that he turned primarily to the troubled relations between men and women. By 1910, with his plays unsuccessfully circulating among actors and directors in the Chicago area, he returned to poetry under the pseudonym of Webster Ford in Songs and Sonnets (1910) and Songs and Sonnets: Second Series (1912). These poems were vaguely autobiographical in that they reflected his troubled marriage and at least one extramarital affair. As Masters shifted from public to personal themes, his language became less conventional and more vernacular, anticipating its application in his greatest work.
The 245 epitaphs in the augmented 1916 Spoon River Anthology (the basis for this Penguin edition) were written in free verse, or what William Dean Howells in one of the few negative notices dismissed as “shredded prose.” Howells, the “Dean” of American Letters at the time, hadn’t liked Whitman’s vers libre either. Nor had he approved of the naturalism of Sister Carrie, in which human beings are determined by the accident of nature—by their heredity and their environment. In Masters’s epitaphs of those many souls “sleeping on the hill” in the fictional town of Spoon River (the name derives from an actual spring near Lewistown, Illinois), the former residents are—like Dreiser’s characters—victims of sex. The dead in “The Hill,” the opening epitaph in Spoon River Anthology, include “Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith:”