Introduction

Edgar Lee Masters was one of the first poets in the world to use free verse in a successful work. This work, Spoon River Anthology, spread throughout the United States as one of the most controversial and loved collections of the time. The popularity of Spoon River Anthology outshines his other works.

His Life

Masters was born in 1868 in Garnet, Kansas, the son of Hardin Wallace Masters and Emma Jerusha Masters. Masters's father was a grocer, schoolteacher, and distinguished lawyer (Kauffman). Masters's mother was also a schoolteacher. During his first eleven years Masters lived and attended school in Petersburg, Illinois. Shortly after Masters turned eleven he and his family moved to Lewiston, Illinois, on the Spoon River. In Lewiston, Masters attended a year at Knox College. Masters studied law while working in his fathers law office. During this time, Masters started submitting his first poems and sonnets to magazines and newspapers.
Following his admittance to the Illinois bar in 1891, Masters went into a partnership with his father. In 1892, Masters moved to Chicago, Illinois, to start a law practice of his own. Before going into law practice with Clarence Darrow, Masters worked as a bill collector. Clarence Darrow was one of the best know defense lawyers in the United States in the early 1900's. While in partnership with Darrow, Masters wrote many poems, books, and plays. During the sixteen years following the publishing of Spoon River Anthology, Masters went from a cherished prairie poet to reviled heretic. In the fall of 1898, Masters married Helen Jenkins the mother of Masters's first three children: Hardin, Marcia, and Madeline. After twenty-five years of marriage, Helen and Masters divorced in 1923 because of their different career goals. Three years later Masters married Ellen F. Coyne, an English teacher, and mother of his fourth child Hilary.

During the last twenty-eight years of his life, Masters gave up his law practice to be a full-time writer. Masters moved from New York City, New York, to Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1950. Before his death Masters had expressed a desire to return to Petersburg, Illinois, but he did not go back until after his death. Masters was buried four graves down from Anne Rutledge the subject of an epitaph in Spoon River Anthology used to deface Lincoln in the eye of the public.
Masters wrote many novels, biographies, plays, essays, poetry, poetic drama, and sonnets throughout his life. However, among these were few of notable repute. His first book, published in 1898, while he practiced law, was A Book of Verses, a collection of various poems he had written during his early life. Fearing a hinderance of his lawyer career, he published his early literary work under many different pseudonyms. The one selection by Masters was Spoon River Anthology, for which he gets most of his repute. In a DISCovering Authors article Spoon River Anthology was "that erstwhile staple of high school English class in which an Illinois town is revealed by epitaphs". In 1916, Masters received the Levins Prize from Poetry Magazine for his work on Spoon River Anthology. Masters also received the National Institute and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1942. In addition, in 1942 he received the Poetry Society of America medal. Other awards include the Shelley Memorial Award, 1944 and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, 1946.

Undistinguished Literary Works

Most of Masters's work was undistinguished and received little attention from critics and the public. Though Masters wrote many plays none of them were ever published or performed. Masters wrote over ten semi-autobiographical novels such as Mitch Miller, 1920, and Skeeters Kirby, 1923. These novels were Huck Finn-like adventures sharing the setting of Masters's boyhood near the Spoon River. "Masters's seven novels exhibit a lack of sustained dramatic power and display the author's inability to provide prolonged character development. Among Masters's biographies was Lincoln: The Man; said to be an act of professional suicide, this biography turned many critics against his because of the way he portrays Lincoln as a "Cold, undersexed man".

The Spoon River Anthology

Masters originally intended to present a history of the Spoon River area by describing the interconnected lives of its inhabitants in a novel. William Marion Reedy inspired Masters to write epitaphs of the citizens of Spoon River after rejecting his more conventional poetry for publication in the periodical Reedy's Mirror. Written in 1914 and published in 1915, this collection of poems, Spoon River Anthology, soon became the biggest success of Masters's career. The anthology contains over two hundred brief poetic monologues appearing under the names of the buried dead in Spoon River's cemetery. The poems were about small-town America's desires and hatreds with the citizens expressing themselves in ways they never could in life. Though Masters receives praise for his innovative format and treatment of subject matter in Spoon River Anthology, traditionalists consider it inappropriate for poetry. Masters published Spoon River Anthology under the pseudonym Webster Ford. Within a year Masters revealed himself to be the author of this acclaimed work. Robert Narveson is quoted as saying, "Then came Master's ghosts, avowing the presence of vice, corruption, greed, and pettiness". Considered a succes de scandale Spoon River Anthology swept the nation and became a hit of the time. Masters inspired many writers such as Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) and Sherwood Anderson (1876). Though Masters never equaled the achievement of Spoon River, he is quoted as saying he did not want to "have but one set of strings". Masters never wanted his audience to believe that he could not write any other type of literature, so he never wrote another selection like Spoon River Anthology.

"The Hill"

The anthology begins with "The Hill", the poem that sets the mood and setting for the rest of the poems. This poem tells about how all these people lived and died in the town of Spoon River and how they interacted with each other. The Hill is more of a brief overview or glimpse of what the rest of the anthology is about. "All, all, are sleeping on the hill.", this statement shows us where all of the citizens of Spoon River have gone.

"Nellie Clark"

Among the epitaphs in the Spoon River grave yard, upon the hill, were many that the public believed should not have been put in print because they were controversial and perverted acts. One such account is that of Nellie Clark, the girl who was molested at the age of eight by a fifteen year old boy. The epitaphs account the village gossip years later when Nellie had married. Her husband did not know of the perversion in Nellie's life and left her because he felt betrayed that she was impure. Middle age Nellie wasted away with sorrow and died. These issues were strongly felt in the 1910s when Spoon River Anthology was released.

"Anne Rutledge", Lincolns...associate.

One of the most recognized selections for Spoon River Anthology is "Anne Rutledge". This is the epitaph of Anne Rutledge the love of Abraham Lincoln. The poem tells about how she loved Lincoln and he left her for a political life. Anne Rutledge was used to "bring all those statues of Honest Abe crashing to the ground, for only by smashing the Lincoln myth might America rise out of Hypocrisy and the materialism into which it was sunk by the war". Since Masters felt it to be one of the more important epitaphs and was one of the first poems added to the anthology. He favored this poem because of his potent dislike of Abraham Lincoln and it shows how Lincoln had a premarital relationship before ever meeting his future wife. Premarital relationships were looked down upon strongly by the many classical supporters of domestic life in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Good Bye

Edgar Lee Masters born in 1868 lived a long and prosperous life until his demise at 82 years old in 1950. Though Masters wrote over thirty-five published works during the course of his life, few received much attention. However, the few works that receive acclaim are among the best literature of the early 1900s. Through Masters' work, America was able to perceive and experience a little of small-town America.