Naturally, Masters’s attack on Lincoln didn’t win him many friends and admirers but instead appeared to cement his reputation as a surly American poet out of sync with the intellectual harmony of the country. He appeared to be turning into an angry iconoclast, as he increasingly scorned public appearances and prevented the anthologizing of his poems. This image was notably deepened when he published a biography of Mark Twain, whose best work was then undergoing a serious revaluation. Here Masters even found himself across the aisle from Mencken, one of his most earnest champions as well as Twain’s. The opening paragraph of Mark Twain: A Portrait (1938) suggests the core of the humorist’s problem in Masters’s view: essentially, Mark Twain was a Southerner who had betrayed his origins and the ideals they stood for.
“Mark Twain traced his ancestry to Virginia, to Samuel Clemens, who married Pamela Goggin and fathered her five children,” he wrote at the beginning of his portrait. “The eldest was John Marshall Clemens, born August 11, 1798. That he was not named Thomas Jefferson Clemens may reveal the political tendencies of Samuel, and explain the subsequent party alliances of his son Mark Twain.” (In other words, Twain’s father was named for the wrong Virginian because the Supreme Court chief justice had been a vocal champion of federalism, whereas Jefferson favored states’ rights.) Though born in humble surroundings, Twain became a supporter of the Republican Party. Masters attacked Twain for wasting his satirical talent on the absurdities of the Bible at the expense of focusing it on the political corruption of his day. Twain, he added, ironically became one of the biggest victims of the Gilded Age—about which he coauthored a satiric account in 1874—mainly because of his heavy investments in the unsuccessful Paige Typesetter in the 1880s, which helped drive his publishing company into bankruptcy.
Masters drew heavily on Van Wyck Brooks’s 1920 thesis in The Ordeal of Mark Twain that Mark Twain, the humorist, had sold Sam Clemens, the artist, down the river. And he berated Twain for not continuing his service in the Confederate Army, which he had briefly joined in 1861, instead abandoning his post for silver mining in Nevada. The biography made most Twain scholars livid, and it hurt Masters financially in the long run. There were few writers-in-residence programs in American colleges during his time, and most of these were controlled by the very professors who had complained about Masters’s attack on one of their most cherished authors. Perhaps encouraged by the fact that Frost enjoyed a succession of university posts as a resident poet, Masters kept asking his aspiring bibliographer Sanders why he was being ignored for the same kind of position at the University of Michigan. “What would be a practicable way to get in touch with some college, there to sit about and talk to students about literature?” he asked the professor in 1943. He was getting desperate as he was being routed “out of my nice suite” on the second floor of the Chelsea by resident soldiers who were noisy and disruptive.
Masters died, nearly penniless, at the age of eighty-one in a nursing home outside Philadelphia in 1950. By then some of the most popular poems in the original Spoon River collection were still appearing in anthologies and would continue to do so for several more decades. His second wife had finally convinced him to give up his resistance to having his Spoon River poems appear in anthologies. He feared the exposure would hurt his other works, but the fact is that Spoon River Anthology today exists in the national memory as piecemeal poems. The collection taken as a whole does not come together in quite the way of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio or the scenes in Our Town. There are perhaps too many voices, regardless of whether some nineteen story lines, as he claimed in “The Genesis of Spoon River,” overlap. Nevertheless, it does remain in some essential way the prototypical story of the American village speaking from the grave and admitting things that could not be broached in life.
Spoon River Anthology survives in the national literary consciousness as the work that initiated a huge change in American literature but was subsequently upstaged or eclipsed by similar but superior works that it had clearly inspired. The subsequent decline of Masters’s reputation today may be as much the result of the poet wars of the 1920s and 1930s as anything else. Masters, even though he had been trained as a lawyer, proved to be anything but subtle or indirect in his relations with other writers. He was not always diplomatic but in fact painfully candid with others in potential conflicts. Like Whitman, he didn’t seem to care that much about money and was happy living in the Chelsea with its worn carpets and financially strapped resident artists. Despite his reduced circumstances because of a divorce that levied heavy alimony payments on him for many years and resulted in the loss of property, he was content to live out his life writing poetry after having reluctantly practiced law for so many years.
No doubt, some of what he wrote deserves a second look. Certainly, Spoon River Anthology does. There is a reason to consider it again as an American classic. In the language of the “new poetry,” or free verse, it tells the story of these village malcontents in the American vernacular. Take, for example, “Hod Putt” (hard put), the second epitaph in the book, in which a man is hanged for killing another during a robbery. Masters captures the slangy sound of the American Midwesterner. In “Thomas Rhodes,” one of the best poems, we learn of the banker who breaks the bank but survives personally. There is “Elliott Hawkins,” who looked like Abraham Lincoln: “I was one of you, Spoon River, in all fellowship[.]” A lobbyist for the rich (which is what Masters imagined Lincoln was as well), the poet of Spoon River has him laughing from the grave:
And now, you world-savers, who reaped nothing in life
And in death have neither stones nor epitaphs,
How do you like your silence from mouths stopped
With the dust of my triumphant career?
Like the directory in a cemetery office, the epitaphs are arranged alphabetically in a table of contents by last name in most cases. We won’t find “Dreiser” there, only “Theodore the Poet.” But we will find “Ford, Webster,” who was epitaphed in Reedy’s Mirror on January 15, 1915. As if his art were prescient of his life, ten days later Masters was stricken with a nearly fatal case of pneumonia like that he had inflicted on his fictional self. At the height of his fame in 1916, he was quoted in the Literary Digest of March 4 to say that the strength of his book was “its indifference; its impartiality; its tolerance; its refusal to label sheep and goats; its determinations that their men and women shall tell their own story, confess their own crime and conviction, assert without approval or blame. The author knows that the truth is never known, or never told, unless the dead can speak.” This expresses the spirit of literary naturalism; it creates a world in which human beings are without free will, and only have choices predetermined by circumstance. Spoon River Anthology may be likened to Dante’s Infernostripped of religious or moral structure. Masters seriously hesitated to reveal himself as the author for fear of hurting his reputation as a lawyer. His fears came true, even though after the literary success he was less and less interested in practicing law, a profession that he often said he hated. He even—at Reedy’s suggestion—dedicated his book to his first wife, yet another ruse by the author who claimed to tell the naked truth.
Edgar Lee Masters stood in the front ranks of American literature early in the twentieth century in two important ways. First, he carried the mantle of Whitman in poetry, and second, he became our first major writer of psychological naturalism, which culminates in the works of such great American writers as Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy, Richard Wright in Native Son, and William Faulkner in his deeply tormented tales of the South in the wake of the Civil War. Spoon River Anthology, Masters’s great naturalistic work, deserves to be read anew and welcomed back into the canon of major American poetry.
—JEROME LOVING
Suggestions for Further Reading
Duffey, Bernard. The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1954.
Flanagan, John T. Edgar Lee Masters: The Spoon River Poet and
His Critics. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974.
Hilfer, Anthony. The Revolt from the Village, 1915-1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969.
Loving, Jerome. The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Masters, Edgar Lee. Across Spoon River. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1936.
———. Doomsday Book. New York: Macmillan, 1920.
———. Lincoln: The Man. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1931.
———. Living Thoughts of Emerson. New York: Longmans, Green, 1940.
———. Mark Twain: A Portrait. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938.
———. Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935.
———. Whitman. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937.
Masters, Hilary. Last Stands: Notes from Memory. Boston: David Godine, 1982.
Primeau, Ronald. Beyond Spoon River: The Legacy of Edgar Lee Masters. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Robinson, Frank K. Edgar Lee Masters: An Exhibition in Commemorationof the Centenary of His Birth. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970.
Russell, Herbert K. Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Spoon River Anthology: An Annotated Edition, ed. John E. Hallwas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1922.
N.B.: The largest collection of the papers of Edgar Lee Masters is housed in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
A Note on the Text
The Penguin text is based upon the augmented edition of 1916, published by Macmillan Company. It contains 245 poems and the “Epilogue.” The original poems of Spoon River Anthology contained only 214 pieces. These were published weekly in Reedy’s Mirror in St. Louis in 1914 and 1915. Masters wrote the additional thirty-one poems and epigraph in the summer and fall of 1915 in preparation for the Macmillan edition.
THE HILL*
WHERE are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
One passed in a fever,
One was burned in a mine,
One was killed in a brawl,
One died in a jail,
One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?—
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart’s desire,
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked
With venerable men of the revolution?—
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
They brought them dead sons from the war,
And daughters whom life had crushed,
And their children fatherless, crying—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where is Old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove,
Of what Abe Lincoln said
One time at Springfield.
HOD PUTT*
HERE I lie close to the grave
Of Old Bill Piersol,
Who grew rich trading with the Indians, and who
Afterwards took the bankrupt law
And emerged from it richer than ever.
Myself grown tired of toil and poverty
And beholding how Old Bill and others grew in wealth,
Robbed a traveler one night near Proctor’s Grove,
Killing him unwittingly while doing so,
For the which I was tried and hanged.
That was my way of going into bankruptcy.
Now we who took the bankrupt law in our respective ways
Sleep peacefully side by side.
OLLIE MCGEE
HAVE you seen walking through the village
A man with downcast eyes and haggard face?
That is my husband who, by secret cruelty
Never to be told, robbed me of my youth and my beauty;
Till at last, wrinkled and with yellow teeth,
And with broken pride and shameful humility,
I sank into the grave.
But what think you gnaws at my husband’s heart?
The face of what I was, the face of what he made me!
These are driving him to the place where I lie.
In death, therefore, I am avenged.
FLETCHER MCGEE
SHE took my strength by minutes,
She took my life by hours,
She drained me like a fevered moon
That saps the spinning world.
The days went by like shadows,
The minutes wheeled like stars.
She took the pity from my heart,
And made it into smiles.
She was a hunk of sculptor’s clay,
My secret thoughts were fingers:
They flew behind her pensive brow
And lined it deep with pain.
They set the lips, and sagged the cheeks,
And drooped the eyes with sorrow.
My soul had entered in the clay,
Fighting like seven devils.
It was not mine, it was not hers;
She held it, but its struggles
Modeled a face she hated,
And a face I feared to see.
I beat the windows, shook the bolts.
I hid me in a corner—
And then she died and haunted me,
And hunted me for life.
ROBERT FULTON TANNER
IF a man could bite the giant hand
That catches and destroys him,
As I was bitten by a rat
While demonstrating my patent trap,
In my hardware store that day.
But a man can never avenge himself
On the monstrous ogre Life.
You enter the room—that’s being born;
And then you must live—work out your soul,
Aha! the bait that you crave is in view:
A woman with money you want to marry,
Prestige, place, or power in the world.
But there’s work to do and things to conquer—
Oh, yes! the wires that screen the bait.
At last you get in—but you hear a step:
The ogre, Life, comes into the room,
(He was waiting and heard the clang of the spring)
To watch you nibble the wondrous cheese,
And stare with his burning eyes at you,
And scowl and laugh, and mock and curse you,
Running up and down in the trap,
Until your misery bores him.
CASSIUS HUEFFER
THEY have chiseled on my stone the words:
“His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man.”
Those who knew me smile
As they read this empty rhetoric.
My epitaph should have been:
And the elements so mixed in him
That he made warfare on life,
In the which he was slain.”
While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!
SEREPTA MASON*
MY life’s blossom might have bloomed on all sides
Save for a bitter wind which stunted my petals
On the side of me which you in the village could see.
From the dust I lift a voice of protest:
My flowering side you never saw!
Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed
Who do not know the ways of the wind
And the unseen forces
That govern the processes of life.
AMANDA BARKER
HENRY got me with child,
Knowing that I could not bring forth life
Without losing my own.
In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.
Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived
That Henry loved me with a husband’s love,
But I proclaim from the dust
That he slew me to gratify his hatred.
CONSTANCE HATELY
YOU praise my self-sacrifice, Spoon River,
In rearing Irene and Mary,
Orphans of my older sister!
And you censure Irene and Mary
For their contempt for me!
But praise not my self-sacrifice,
And censure not their contempt;
I reared them, I cared for them, true enough!—
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