“He took on and critiqued the whole trope of bucolic America with the white farmhouse and the red barn and the brimming silo.”Īs unflinching as “Spoon River Anthology” is, the poems also leave much of their most startling content unsaid. So why has a book of poetry that was so critical of America’s idea of itself done so well over the years? “Edgar Lee Masters hit the heart of a disillusionment that was abroad in the land,” says novelist Douglas Unger, who teaches at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and at the Black Mountain Institute. The book became a landmark in American poetry, selling 80,000 copies in its first year, and has never been out of print.
The book genuinely shocked readers when it came out in 1915 - Masters’ dramatic monologues take on subjects like suicide and sexual violence, telling a story about small-town America that isn’t positive or pretty. Death has loosened their tongues, and they tell us what they really think about their hopes and dreams and damaged lives. Superseding seventy-five years of misdirected critical commentary, the annotated Spoon River Anthology comprehends a poet and his towering work in an entirely new way.In “ Spoon River Anthology,” the denizens of Edgar Lee Masters’ fictional Midwestern town speak to us from the grave. Hallwas's approach combines cultural, biographical, philosophical, psychoanalytic, mythic, and symbolic insights-and concludes with a stunning reassessment of "Our New Poet." An extensive introduction links the poems to Whitman and reveals the influence of Browning, Goethe, and Spinoza on Masters. Extensive annotations identify the people whose lives inspired the 243 poetic accounts of frustration, violence, struggle, and triumph that shocked American readers.
Hallwas directs a new edition that enriches and interprets Masters's classic for a new generation of admirers.
About the BookOne of the most striking and original achievements in American poetry, Spoon River Anthology probed the social background of the small-town world that Edgar Lee Masters loved and hated-and finally transmuted into powerful literary art.
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