Edger Lee Masters & Lewis

Edger Lee Masters, a Chicagoan lawyer by vocation, but by avocation a poet, composed his “Spoon River Anthology” (1915), as a series of epitaph poetry influenced by the tenth century Greek Anthology. He had modeled it into a free verse pattern. This copy was given to him by William Marion Reedy of St. Lewis, editor of “Reedy’s Mirror”, in 1909.

The anthology was a chain of epigrams and epitaphs on love, life and death. Masters extended the set unconsciously into “Hod putt” and “Serepta the Cold” and other sketches to be released as the revised Spoon River Anthology. The thematic contents of the poems of the people of Spoon River were the stories as Heare said of Petersburg and Lewistown. They were characters inter-locked by fate and misjudged souls given a chance to be judged fairly and seriously. The “Henry George Weekly” was generous to publish this poetry. The “Mirror” published ten at a time. The book form consisting of two hundred and six poems was released in 1915. It was the faith of the speakers to welcome “freedom from earth’s sphere” after a lifetime of battle to be strong and true.

This was one of the most momentous works in American poetry. From the author’s autobiographical “Across Spoon River”, one could note, in retrospect, the poet’s revulsion towards village life. It was characterized by meanness and hypocrisy of a village in Southern Illinois, with which the poet was quite conversant. With his lawyer’s precise eye, Masters had a sharp look into the lives of these villagers whom he had half-forgotten, half-invented.

The epitaph form used in disclosing their secrets permitted the dead to give the lie to words or symbol carved on the gravestone. The device was to place a contrasting character that had exploited or hated or quietly loved each other. He had set up ironical partials to the fundamental tones of sudden death, suicide and isolated spirituality. Some of the heroic dead lay on the Hill since the days of pioneering. They could not understand their degenerate descendants and their reveries would add the perspective of time.

Living at a time when Anderson and Theodore Dreiser wrote, Masters became the mouthpiece of the character Jefferson Howard. “Foe of the Church with its charmer darkness. Friend of the human touch of the tavern”. Through his creative punctuations produced one a year steadily, his heyday was in the past, 1915, the year of the publication of “Spoon River Anthology".

The importance of this magnum opus was that it was well timed. Megapolis corrupting the American Eden was made to loom large over everybody in America. Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis were then ready to report the spread of infection into the villages, the erstwhile havens of Heaven, itself buttressed by the virtues of democracy. Masters was the first of the lifters of the veil of decency over the village of Winesburg, Ohio.

The question would arise, whether this was the single biggest influence on the Nobel-prize-winning novel “Main Street” (1920) written by Sinclair Lewis. Opposing critics like the academics alleged that “Main Street” was an echo of the “Spoon River Anthology”. Lewis made his reply in unmincing terms that though he had heard it in parts, he never had read it. Lewis was quite influenced by his forebear, Edgar Lee Masters.

But “Main Street” was a superior societal documentary, with Carol Kennicott as an individual, sophisticated to the core, ready to wage her war-like reform on the Gopher-Prairie society. Also Lee Masters’ choice of medium was a limitation on him to express himself in clear, unambivalent terms. As a novel in prose, it stands out as superior to both “Spoon River Anthology” of Edgar Lee Masters and to the entire fiction of Sherwood Anderson.