“Good friends, let’s to the fields.” — Edgar Lee Masters’ epitaph

Edgar Lee Masters (born on this day) was a lawyer (one of his law partners was Clarence Darrow!) and a poet. He published a couple of books and biographies (one of Walt Whitman, a poet he admired). He was no slouch. But a major poet? No.

However, he ended up writing a series of poems told from the point of view of the dead citizens of a small town called Spoon River (Spoon River Anthology) that has to be one of the most popular books of poetry of all time. Edgar Lee Masters has a kind of success that most poets can only dream of.

Like so many poets of this era, one name appears in the biography as essential: Harriet Monroe, founder and editor of Poetry magazine. She published so many new people, people who couldn’t find homes for their work in more traditional magazines. Masters sent her his Spoon River poems, and she eventually helped him put it all together in a book, and publish it. It was an immediate success. It struck a chord. It still does.

Edgar Lee Masters would not have been known if he hadn’t taken on the job of “mimic”, or “mouthpiece”, whatever you want to call it. What happens in these “Spoon River” poems is you hear specific voices, cadences, accents, emotions, these people are raw. They have nothing to hide. They’re dead. They are dead, yes, but they plead with us, the living, to hear their stories, to understand what happened. They plead with us, for retribution, forgiveness. They reach out from beyond the grave, trying to either make things right, or be heard, or to defend their horrible actions. Death has NOT been a release for these people. None of them sit in the blessed light of Jesus, forgiven and peaceful. The afterlife is a bleak place writhing with unfinished business.

Masters imagines his way into another person’s psyche, and then speaks AS THEM. That is his gift. He is a mouthpiece. Being a great mouthpiece means you have an even better ear. You have to listen well to be a great mimic. If he had been writing verse about the beautiful sunset over his town or the way the river looked at dawn or about his childhood memories, we’d never be anthologizing him. Spoon River Anthology put him on the map. It was a success during his lifetime, too. He didn’t have to wait until after his death to have his say.

One of my great acting teachers in college, Kimber Wheelock (tribute to him here) had us pick out poems from “Spoon River” to work on as dramatic monologues. It’s a great assignment for student actors since every poem is filled with character details, back story, objectives, secrets, lies, catharsis. The most important question an actor has to know how to answer: Why am I saying this? Why do I NEED to say this? (whatever it is) – is so present in Spoon River, I mean that’s what they’re all about. You have one chance to say what you need to say from beyond the grave: what will you choose, and why? Those “Spoon River” classes were gratifying work, and I still remember which one I chose, poor cross-eyed Minerva Jones. I was 18 when I worked on this in class. I can still recite it by heart.

Minerva Jones

I am Minerva, the village poetess,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,
And all the more when “Butch” Weldy
Captured me after a brutal hunt.
He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;
And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,
Like stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.
Will someone go to the village newspaper
And gather into a book the verses I wrote?–
I thirsted so for love!
I hungered so for life!

Here’s the thing: You cannot “phone in” those two final lines. They must be real, they must come from a real place. Masters’ gift was capturing all of the griefs/anger/seething resentments of small-town America, and by breaking it up into small chunks like that, by the end of that book, you have a full tapestry. No matter who you are, where you come from, you will find a little bit of yourself in Spoon River Anthology. It might be spread out over 5 or 6 poems – you relate to a little bit of this one, a little bit of that one … and taken on as a whole, it starts to feel like he has somehow captured all of humanity in it.

Each poem is a whole world in miniature. People are naming names, man, after death: they want us to know WHO did this to them, who hurt them, who betrayed them. Each voice is specific, you can hear the old men, young girls, frumpy housewives, mechanics, the local doctor. Edgar Lee Masters had a unique ear: he could hear everybody.

If any of you out there are acting teachers of beginning actors in the age-range of, oh, 17 to 22 … consider using Spoon River Anthology as a source of monologues for your class. Or read the book yourself, and assign a poem to each person, based on what you know about that person, what they might need to work on, etc. I would say any younger than 17 would not be good, because of the subject matter of the poems. But it’s a great acting exercise, a great way to exercise the imagination of young actors. They are also great to teach what it means by “high stakes”. People, in general, don’t want to live in a state of “high stakes” all the time, and actors are no different. There isn’t a poem in the collection where the stakes are not sky-high.

I mean, here it is 25 years later, and I still remember “I thirsted so for love, I hungered so for life!”

Here is another poem from Spoon River Anthology:

Elsa Wertman

I was a peasant girl from Germany,
Blue-eyed, rosy, happy and strong.
And the first place I worked was at Thomas Greene’s.
On a summer’s day when she was away
He stole into the kitchen and took me
Right in his arms and kissed me on my throat,
I turning my head. Then neither of us
Seemed to know what happened.
And I cried for what would become of me.
And cried and cried as my secret began to show.
One day Mrs. Greene said she understood,
And would make no trouble for me,
And, being childless, would adopt it.
(He had given her a farm to be still. )
So she hid in the house and sent out rumors,
As if it were going to happen to her.
And all went well and the child was born — They were so kind to me.
Later I married Gus Wertman, and years passed.
But — at political rallies when sitters-by thought I was crying
At the eloquence of Hamilton Greene —
That was not it.
No! I wanted to say:
That’s my son!
That’s my son!

I will close out with this moment in Radu Jude’s masterful 2021 film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn – a vicious lamooning polemic – filmed at the height of the pandemic, and a perfect distillation of every single stupid thing happening in our current world. So there’s this. “Timely.”

Edgar Lee Masters’ full epitaph:

Good friends, let’s to the fields …
After a little walk, and by your pardon,
I think I’ll sleep. There is no sweeter thing,
Nor fate more blessed than to sleep.

I am a dream out of a blessed sleep –
Let’s walk and hear the lark.

Herbert K. Russell, Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography on Spoon River Anthology:

The volume became an international popular and critical success and introduced with a flourish what has since come to be known as the Chicago Renaissance.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

If one could write true epitaphs, instead of conventional ones, a whole community might appear as it actually was rather than as it seemed to be. These ideas animated Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, his one memorable book in a lifetime of writing.

Ernest Earnest, Western Humanities Review:

It is safe to say that no other volume of poetry except The Waste Land (1922) made such an impact during the first quarter of [the 20th] century.

Edgar Lee Masters, American Mercury:

The names I drew from both the Spoon river and the Sangamon river neighborhoods, combining first names here with surnames there, and taking some also from the constitutions and State papers of Illinois. Only in a few instances, such as those of Chase Henry, William H. Herndon and Anne Rutledge and two or three others, did I use anyone’s name as a whole.

Herbert K. Russell, Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography on Spoon River Anthology:

[Masters was] the victim of the success of his one enduring achievement, Spoon River Anthology; no matter what he published after it, he could never produce a rival to it, and so each ensuing volume represented a decline. Spoon River Anthology made him famous, but it also contributed to some of the sadness in his life, and it is (to borrow from it) his ‘true epitaph, more lasting than stone.’

Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Critic’s Credentials: Essays and Reviews:

[Spoon River Anthology was a] succes de scandale-—it was the sex-shocker, the Peyton Place of its day. Knowing that childbirth would kill his wife, Henry Barker impregnated her out of hatred. The only feeling Benjamin Pantier inspired in his wife was sexual disgust. Old Henry Bennett died of overexertion in the bed of his young wife.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Masters emphasized later that the book was organized in terms of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven (on Earth), and it began with the ne’er-do-wells, moved on to mixed, purgatorial types, and concluded with those who had achieved some illumination. The book’s success came in part from the inspired simplicity of its aim. The types of people were familiar; their sly misdoings were those that everyone could recognize their neighbors to be guilty of. The style was not ambitious, but often hit home. Its prosiness allowed for unexpectedly terse phrases inlaid among the slack ones. The solemn reverberations of death mixed with the flamboyant chatter of life.

Carl Van Doren, Contemporary American Novelists:

It was the scandal and not the poetry of Spoon River … which particularly spread its fame.

Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry:

One wonders, if life in our little Western cities is as bad as this, why everyone does not commit suicide.

Ezra Pound, The Egoist:

At last. At last America has discovered a poet. At last the American West has produced a poet strong enough to weather the climate, capable of dealing with life directly, without circumlocution, without resonant meaningless phrases.

Carl Sandburg in the Little Review:

Once in a while a man comes along who writes a book that has his own heart-beats in it. The people whose faces look out from the pages of the book are the people of life itself, each trait of them as plain or as mysterious as in the old home valley where the writer came from. Such a writer and book are realized here.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Many American poets have sought to embrace all of America. What attracts them is perhaps that the country is so large, sprawling, and hard to handle. This grandiose sensuality goes back to Walt Whitman, who wrote, “I embrace multitudes.” In the twentieth century, America’s chief lovers included William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. For both, America seemed a center of intense, multifarious feelings. They differ from regionalists, such as Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Frost, whose relations even to their regions were more ambiguous.

Herbert K. Russell, on Lincoln: The Man:

Masters, a Jeffersonian Democrat, was so unfair to his Republican subject that Lincoln: The Man drew some of the most hostile criticism ever leveled at an American biography.

Fred Lewis Pattee, The New American Literature: 1890-1930:

The value of the Spoon River volume lies in its originality of design, its uniqueness, its effect upon its times. Its colossal success started a choir of young poets. Whether we condemn or praise, we must accept it as a major episode in the history of the poetic movement in the second decade of the new century.

Louis Untermeyer, American Poetry since 1900:

With Spoon River Anthology, Masters arrived—and left.

 
 
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