A review of Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 collection of graveyard poems, Spoon River Anthology, which was embraced by many radicals of its time.

‘Spoon River Anthology’ by Stella Comyn from Mother Earth. Vol. 10 No. 9. November, 1915.

ONCE in a decade in American literature there appears such a book as Edgar Lee Master’s Anthology of Spoon River, tearing the sentimental veil of hypocrisy from our lives and revealing things as they are, in their bitterness, pettiness, ugliness, horror,—and beauty. Those who deny Walt Whitman the laurel crown will not admit Masters a poet, but those who know truth is beauty will hail him as one of the few realistic American poets of our time.

The plan of this book of poems is unique. We get the true inner histories of the individuals of a community, each revealing his naked soul in a series of epitaphs. The blind, the lame and the halt, who seemed so strong, so upright, so honorable in the flesh are here. And the true, the sweet, the noble, who appeared so false, so weak, so helpless among the living. And with what poignancy and power are life’s little ironies shown in this free, unshackled verse.

After the deluge of sugar coated, puritanic American writings, Masters’ history of Spoon River comes as a relief, and leads those who believe in the future of American letters to hail him as a master realist—one who has given us an unforgettable, living record of human beings, mixed together by Fate, in the end at rest at last,

“all, all, are sleeping on the hill.”

There are Benjamin Pantier and his wife, joined in holy marriage, Benjamin who lies with his only companion in life, his dog Nig, and who

“in the morning of life knew aspiration and saw glory,
Then she who survives me, snared my soul
With a snare which bled me to death.”

And she;

“Suppose you are a woman well endowed
And the only man with whom the law and morality
Permit you to have the martial relation
Is the very man that fills you with disgust.”

And Daisy Fraser, the town prostitute, despised, mocked and reviled, who

“Never was taken before Judge Arnett
Without contributing ten dollars and costs
To the school fund of Spoon River.”

The poetess, Minerva Jones, hungry for life and love, betrayed and killed by an abortion, and her father, poor and downtrodden, “who crept like a snail through the days of my life’ yet “I was purer blooded than the white trash here.”—Doctor Meyers, who loved his kind and failed to help Minerva, indicted and disgraced.

Our heroes and patriots suffer no less from Masters’ searching pen. Knowlt Hoheimer runs away and joins the army because he stole some pigs. He, too, lies on the hill under a marble figure and asks,

“And this granite pedestal
Bearing the words, ‘Pro Patria’
What do they mean, anyway?”

And all the time, even on the hill, Lydia thinks he ran away because he was jealous of her and “back of every soldier is a woman.” Harry Wilmans, who enlisted, inspired by the patriotic speech of the Sunday school superintendent:

“And I went to war in spite of my father
And followed the flag till I saw it raised
By our camp in a rice field near Manila
And all of us cheered and cheered it.
But there were flies and poisonous things;
And there was the deadly water
And the cruel heat,
And the sickening putrid food;
And the smell of the trench just back of the tents
Where the soldiers went to empty themselves;
And there were the whores who followed us, full of syphilis;
And beastly acts between ourselves or alone
With bullying, hatred, degradation among us
And days of loathing and nights of fear
To the hour of the charge through the steaming swamp
Following the flag,
Till I fell with a scream, shot through the guts
Now there’s a flag over me in Spoon River!
A flag! A flag!”

Nor do the mighty escape, stripped as they are of their garments of pretense and respectability. John M. Church, the attorney, who robbed the widow and orphan, the Bar Association sang his praises, “but rats devoured my heart and a snake made a nest in my skull;” and the State Attorney, upholder of the law, inexorable, driving the jury to hang a madman, father of an idiot. Ezra Bartlett, chaplain in the army and prisons, yet bringing poor Eliza Johnson to shame; Editor Whedon, who was able to see every side, pervert truth, for base designs, in short, to be an editor, lies “where the sewage flows from the village and abortions are hidden.” And the shade of Judge Somers inquires pitifully why he “most erudite of lawyers, who knew Blackstone and Coke almost by heart, lies unmarked and forgotten, where the town drunkard has a marble block, topped by an urn?”

And the unwordly failures, who yet like Blind Jack, the fiddler, killed in a runaway, tells of

“A blind man here with a brow
As big and white as a cloud.
And all we fiddlers, from highest to lowest
Writers of music and tellers of stories
Sit at his feet
And hear him sing of the fall of Troy.”

Beautiful and tender woman spirits, too, are sleeping on the hill. Emily Sparks, the school teacher, and her mother prayer.

“The boy I loved best of all in the school?—
I, the teacher, the old maid, the virgin heart,
Who made them all my children

Work for your soul’s sake,
That all the clay of you, all the dross of you
May yield to the fire of you
Till the fire is nothing but light.
Nothing but light!”

And the pure loveliness of Ann Rutledge, “beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln”

“Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music.”

So, out of the chaos, the brutality, the wretchedness of life as we found it and make it, as Masters portrays it, come gleams of light and promise.

Mother Earth was an anarchist magazine begin in 1906 and first edited by Emma Goldman in New York City. Alexander Berkman, became editor in 1907 after his release from prison until 1915.The journal has a history in the Free Society publication which had moved from San Francisco to New York City. Goldman was again editor in 1915 as the magazine was opposed to US entry into World War One and was closed down as a violator of the Espionage Act in 1917 with Goldman and Berkman, who had begun editing The Blast, being deported in 1919.

PDF of full issue: https://archive.org/download/mother-earth/Mother%20Earth%20v10n09%20%281915-11%29%20%28c2c%20Harvard%29.pdf