Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee MastersLike Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which would follow a few years later, Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology exposes the psychologies beneath the surface facades in a small midwestern American town. Both works upset the myth of small town America as a place of idyllic enchantment. Stay long enough to hear the inhabitants speak, these works say, and that myth will be destroyed by intrigues, evil, greed and depravity. All the fallibilities of the average citizen are herein exposed to paint a picture quite different from the one which literature had provided previously. In its relentless probing, in its exposure of ordinary citizen's innermost thoughts and feelings, Master's epic steers American literature into a place of brutal frankness unstopped by the prudish, Calvinist sensibilities that would have preferred the perpetuation of polite repression. K. Narayana Chandran (in "Revolt from the Grave: Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters," in Midwest Quarterly 29, Summer 1988) speaks of how the Anthology re-mapped the myth to reverse the premises. What is revealed is an abhorrent small town community in which a generation that has seen the impending envelopment of their rural existence threatened by the fast approach of metal machinery can narrate their stories of lives "remarkably different from what one reads as 'official' history." And certainly the number of murders and suicides, back room abortions, secret burials and corrupt politicians, not to mention disappointments and broken dreams, support this claim. Ronald Primeau (in Beyond Spoon River: The Legacy of Edgar Lee Masters, Austin: University of Texas, 1981) agrees that the poem subverts the "excessive romanticizing" about the pastoral village that had failed to acknowledge the unpleasantness and complications of that life. Regionalist literature refutes stereotypes, he says, and is "as changeable as the varying moods derived from the sense of place." He sees Masters' contribution as a "quest for hidden meanings rather than analysis of what was." Speaking of "The Landscape," a poem from 1918, Primeau points out "the speaker's discovery that his own vision and experience either invest meaning in the landscape or make it barren. He discovers that the sense of place receives its energy from within and reflects back the human soul . . ." The background leading up to the composition of the poem is provided by John H. and Margaret Wrenn (in their book Edgar Lee Masters, Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1983). Masters was newly arrived in Chicago in 1893 and just getting on his feet as a big city lawyer and making literary acquaintances among the men who made up the Press Club, when the Chicago World's Fair opened. This event crystallized some forces fermenting in Masters' consciousness, especially the demonstration of the new progress overtaking the pastoral, and how the "inevitable drift of forces to a capitalistic economy" swept up the regional communities into a unifying center. The Wrenns present those publications that give a context to Masters. Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tilbury Town portraits and A.E. Housman, in England, both used the local portrait to illustrate the macrocosm. Stephen Crane's novel Maggie, impressive for its directness and candor and its acknowledgment of the sordid elements present around us, led critic Robert Spiller to proclaim: "With that [publication] modern American fiction was born." In 1898 Masters married the daughter of a railroad president, less for love it seems than for the hope of a salaried position with her father and the convenience of having his sewing and laundry taken care of. Around this time he entered a law partnership with Clarence Darrow, who'd become famous in 1925 for arguing, unsuccessfully, against the fundamental views of William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes, or "Monkey," Trial. The two men had a common, small Midwestern town background, both were fervent about social reform and were devoted to labor causes, and both had, by the time of their partnership, each published two books. Farmington, Darrow's novel, is a "recounting of the small-town lives of remembered characters who have died, and their hopes and failures." In 1909 Masters was given a copy of the Greek Anthology which collects a series of first-person epitaphs spoken by the dead. He'd later acknowledge its importance in his working up his own anthology. An intense two year affair with Tennessee Mitchell, who had been a piano teacher (and would later become Mrs. Sherwood Anderson), was also instrumental in the germination of the book, for her "effect on his powers of insight" and for greatly deepening his "emotional powers." Serious talks with his grandmother, for him the matriarch of the region, gave him portraits of the locals and refreshed his memories. He also became friends with Theodore Dreiser, the writer whose realistic novels exposed social evils. From Dreiser's writings Masters picked up clues about the discernment of the realities embedded below the surface and a way to openly discuss subjects that had been untouchable before, like sex. After a trip together to the Petersburg area, Dreiser urged Masters to exploit his Illinois background, to make of it the source of his writing. Besides introducing Masters to Chicago's bohemia, Carl Sandburg showed Masters his poetry in the winter of 1913–14. From it he seems to have been nudged and encouraged in the direction of imagism and free verse. Sandburg certainly "praised enthusiastically" the poems Masters was showing him at the time; the poems, many of them written on napkins between court sessions, that would become the Spoon River Anthology. His imagism was encouraged by seeing Ezra Pound's poems in Poetry magazine. Pound, in England at the time, would be an early champion of the Anthology. His friend, William Marion Reedy, who'd publish groups of the poems in his newspaper Reedy's Mirror, must also be credited for his editorial influence on the forming of Masters' voice for the poetry that would compose Spoon River Anthology. Reedy is, however, also condemned for losing any critical perspective in his publishing of anything Masters sent him, once the success of Spoon River Anthology had made them both well known. Most, if not all, of the characters and events depicted in the Anthology are based on actuality. Through exhaustive research into school board, church and city council minutes, dozens of interviews with descendants and investigation into other local sources, Charles E. Burgess (in "Spoon River: Politics and Poetry," Papers on Language and Literature 23, Summer 1987) exposes the factual precedents onto which Masters built his epic. With the poet's father, Hardin, figuring very prominently in the political and social events of Lewistown (he'd eventually serve several terms as mayor), it's not difficult to imagine how, 25 years later, Masters could retain his sense of passion and connectedness to the action. The failure of Thomas Rhodes' bank, for example, is based on the collapse, in 1894, of the bank of the real Henry Phelps, a powerful figure in Lewistown who both Edgar Lee and his father despised for his conservative politics' effects on the town. The burning of the courthouse, Silas Dement's story, is revealed to be the work of individuals who wanted a new one built. The court records of the time reveal that Chase Henry, a syphilitic alcoholic, was paid $197 by alderman and hotel operator Oscar Baughman to do the deed while ex-city marshall Ellis Brown held the ladder. The Anthology is filled with various voices offering their well-intentioned advice or their admonishments. Perhaps the readjustment or the banishment of the power relationship—the tyranny of the authoritative voice speaking down to the populace from on high—is one element contributing to the forming of Modernism. The haloed, elevated tone of those speakers locates the poem in the 19th century or earlier with its cliches and obligations to traditional forms. Masters' value and his contribution to modernity is when he gets away from that rigor—that need to impose a hierarchy so the privileged can maintain their position by prescribing rules that establish subordinate and commander—and allows his characters to speak of their experience in their own plain language, untainted with the filigree of refinement. His tripped bare poetry looks to the future—toward the Objectivist movement, esp. Charles Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams—in allowing the spoken language of the pedestrian to represent the person without the author's imposition. This book is celebrated for its achievement at wedging open the way we can regard experience. The work broadens the range of available information to complicate the 19th century's attempt to simplify types into predictable behaviors. For example, Harry Wilmans' (199) subversion or independence of mind is modern in his not having to align himself with a movement to seek comfort in the group identity; to have the will and courage to question the established order; to find fault with the propaganda of flag-waving. Scholfield Huxley's (233) challenging of God would have been unthinkable in the 19th century, without his being portrayed as mad or somehow tainted. Masters accepted the inevitability of progress. He realized that the romantic nostalgia for small-town innocence was based on a mythology that remembered something that had never occurred. With the insight he earned by removing himself into the cacaphonous metropolis, he saw the small towns he'd come from as afraid of intelligence, afraid of the spheres beyond their immediate scope. He felt the town's self-imposed isolation and paranoid fear of anyone who strives to excel past the boundaries of the mundane day-to-day existence. The living town is as dead as the graveyard when they confine themselves to the familiar and scoff at change or settle into a manner of living that closes itself off from new ideas or closes itself to people who bring unfamiliar concepts. "If there is a single theme to the Anthology," the Wrenns proclaim, "it is the old American-Jeffersonian theme of liberty: a plea for each individual to be granted the freedom to work out his own destiny, his salvation or damnation, with a minimum of political and social restraint." Though this call for tolerance is certainly worthwhile hearing, there are qualifying restrictions set up as parameters. These traditional Jeffersonian values, the Wrenns explain, are for "strictly heterosexual relationships, and Christian love, all based in a fundamental individualism which includes a belief in personal immortality and a salvation determined by one's conduct in this life." Ultimately, the book's crescendoing piling of voices urges a look beneath appearances, a consideration of the characters dwelling within the types, the persons within the personae. Masters asks that before passing judgment we look deeper than the role life has consigned his players to. Perhaps we might be capable of not judging, he hints, if we're able to understand circumstances, if we can give up hierarchies of power that need to play off domination and submission. If we can accept life flowing like the Spoon River. Bibliography Burgess, Charles E., "Spoon River: Politics and Poetry," Papers on Language and Literature 23, Summer 1987 Chandran, K. Narayana, "Revolt from the Grave: Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters," Midwest Quarterly 23, Summer 1988 Primeau, Ronald, Beyond Spoon River: The Legacy of Edgar Lee Masters, Austin: University of Texas, 1981 Russell, Herbert K., The Enduring River: Edgar Lee Masters' Uncollected Spoon River Poems, Carbondale, Il, Southern Illinois UP, 1991 Wrenn, John H. and Margaret, Edgar Lee Masters, Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1983 |