IN THIS ISSUE - SpoonRiver Anthology
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1. Publisher Notes
2. Edgar Lee Masters
3. Anti-Imperialism
4. The SpoonRiver Anthology
5. WritingSpoonRiver
6. Classified Ads
7. Subscription Management
8. Advertising Rates
9. Contact Information
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1. Publisher Notes
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Dear Reader:
Hello again. This issue will introduce many of you to Edgar Lee Masters and his wonderful Spoon River Anthology. Masters was a well known member of the Chicago Group along with Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Ben Hecht, Sherwood Anderson.
By the way, please excuse our down time. Our website was off the air for a day and a half due to a server crash. We hope no one was inconvenienced.
Richard Goldstein Information Resources
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2. Edgar Lee Master
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Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas. In 1880 his family settled at Lewistown, Illinois, near SpoonRiver,where Masters grew up on his grandfather's farm. Lewistown and Petersburg became models for the scene of his poems in Spoon River Anthology. Masters's father was a lawyer, and did not encourage his son's literary aspirations, refusing to support studies in this field. He attended KnoxCollege, and was admitted to the bar in 1891. He moved to Chicago, where he worked as a lawyer for nearly thirty years. Through hard work and self- determination, he became a partner of the famous defense attorney, Clarence Darrow. He contracted pneumonia through overwork and his legal clients started to decrease partlybecause his revealing poems about bigotry and liaisons in SpoonRiver arose controversy. After retiring Masters devoted himself entirely to writing.
During the years in Chicago Masters married. He travelled in Europe, established his own law firm. At the same time he continued to write, and became friends with Harriet Monroe, editor of the Poetry magazine, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Ben Hecht, Sherwood Anderson, Keith Preston, Llewellyn Jones, Vincent Starrett, and Lew Sarett and other member of the so-called Chicago Group. This circle meant much to Masters, who was throughout his life bitter because of the scornful attitude in Lewistown for his writing. As a poet Masters made his debut already in
1898 with A BOOK OF VERSES. It was followed by MAXIMILIAN (1902), a drama in blank verse, THE NEW STAR CHAMBER (1904), a collection of essays, BLOOD OF THE PROPHETS (1905), and two plays, ALTHEA (1907) and THE BREAD OF IDLENESS (1911).
In 1909 Masters was introduced to Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, given him by Marion Reedy, editor of Reedy's Mirror of St. Louis. This inspired Masters' most famous work, Spoon River Anthology, realistic and sometimes cynical epitaphs spoken by about 250 persons buried in the graveyard of a village in the Middle West. "You will die, noboubt, but die while living / In depths of azure, rapt and mated, / Kissing the queen-bee, Life!" Original idea for the book came from his mother, with whom he discussed people they used to know in the vilages. The work appeared first anomymously in Reedy's Mirror in 1914 and 1915. It was then published anonymously in book form. A sequel, The New Spoon River, appeared in 1924, but it was less successful. SpoonRiver was Masters's revenge on narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy. It gained a huge popularity, but shattered his postion as a respectable member of establishment. When his wife did not grant him a divorce, Masters left his family and fled in 1921 to Europe. The height of the Chicago renaissance was passed, and Masters considered impossible to return back to his home town. He moved to New York, and after the divorce was settled, Masters remarried.
Besides poems Masters published biographies of Vachel Lindsay, who was his friend and fellow poet, Mark Twain, whom he depicted a frustrated genius, and Walt Whitman. His sharply critical study of the Civil War president Abraham Lincoln (1931) was the only one of his later books to gain a wider attention. ACROSS SPOONRIVER (1939) was Masters's autobiography.
Though Masters continued to publish volumes of verse almost yearly, the quality of his work never reached the level of his masterpiece. He lived his last years alone in small hotel in New York, and died in Philadelphia on March 5, 1950.
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3. Anti-Imperialism
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Unlike most of the anti-imperialists, Masters opposed the Spanish-American War. "I had read enough in the papers to know that war was avoidable," he wrote in his autobiography, Across Spoon River (1936), "and I resolved to have nothing to do with it." He was roused to action by the annexation of the Philippines and the beginning of the new war there. He threw himself into studying the history of the Constitution and the United States' republican form of government, and within the next few years wrote a play, Maximilian
(1902), a volume of poetry, and a series of essays on imperialism. During the 1900 presidential campaign, he wrote numerous essays and speeches opposing imperialism and supporting the campaign of William Jennings Bryant,the anti-imperialist Democratic candidate. In October of 1900, The Public, a Chicago-based weekly edited by the single taxer and anti-imperialist, Louis F. Post, called Masters' pamphlet, The Constitution and Our Insular Possessions (1900), "the best presentation of the Philippine question, in its constitutional and other legal aspects, that has yet come to our attention." His literary and political efforts received favorable reviews from the anti-imperialists but hurt his law practice. His isolation led him to accept an offer to become the law partner of Clarence Darrow, one of the most prominent civil rights lawyers of the time. He explained in his autobiography:
I was known over Chicago and Illinois by this time as the author of the constitutional articles and political essays published in the Chronicle, and in Tom Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine; and also as the author of a pamphlet entitled "The Constitution and Our Insular Possessions," which had made the conservative lawyers of Chicago indignant at me. Thus my life had moved in such a way that I was unwelcome among the lawyers who were doing a large business, and there was no place for me to go but to the radicals.While in practice with Darrow, Masters collected some of the essays written during and shortly after the 1900 campaign and published them as The New Star Chamber and Other Essays (1904). He published his early anti-imperialist poems in The Blood of the Prophets (1905) under the pseudonym Dexter Wallace. Darrow had been a vice president of the Chicago Liberty Meeting of April 1899 that led to the formation of the Central Anti-Imperialist League in Chicago, and he would later join the national committee of the All-American Anti-Imperialist League (1928). In 1904, Masters signed the Philippine Independence Committee's petition to the Republican and Democratic national conventions calling for the ultimate independence of the Philippines. His opposition to imperialism continued for many years. He returned to the turn-of-the-century events in the Philippines in his Spoon River Anthology
(1915) and a verse play, Manila (1930), and in 1916 he reminded the country that it was the seizure of the Philippines that made it difficult to stay neutral as warfare raged in Europe. The Spanish-American War "changed the form of our government," he wrote in his autobiography, and entrance into the World War "would solidify that change."
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4. The SpoonRiver Anthology
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The original work was published as a serialized version in 1914-15. In the Anthology, the dead in an Illinois graveyard relay, in matter-of-fact but haunting tones, details from their lives. The Anthology was original, provocative and influentual. Its literary significance has been compared with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass [published in 1855]. 244 former citizens of the fictional Spoon River, Illinois tell us the truth about their lives—with the honesty no fear of consequences enables. Written in free verse, these often-irreverent histories turn the classic idyllic view of small town life upside down.
Of course what made Spoon River Anthology immediately popular was the shock of recognition. Here for the first time in America was the whole of a society which people recognized - not only that part of it reflected in writers of the genteel tradition. Like Chaucer's pilgrims, the 244 characters who speak their epitaphs represent almost every walk of life--from Daisy Frazer, the town prostitute, to Hortense Robbins, who had travelled everywhere, rented a house in Paris and entertained nobility; or from Chase Henry, the town drunkard, to Perry Zoll, the prominent scientist, or William R Herndon, the law partner of Abraham Lincoln. The variety is far too great for even a partial list. There are scoundrels, lechers, idealists, scientists, politicians, village doctors, atheists and believers, frustrated women and fulfilled women. The individual epitaphs take on added meaning because of often complex interrelationships among the characters. SpoonRiver is a community, a microcosm, not a collection of individuals.
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5. WritingSpoonRiver
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From May 29, 1914, until about January 5, 1915, I poured the epitaphs into the Mirror, having written to Reedy that if this was what he liked I could give him all that he could print. By mid-Summer. the pieces were being quoted and parodied all over America, and they had penetrated to England. At this time I was carrying a difficult case through the Supreme Court of Illinois, and was acting for the Waitresses' Union in an injunction which kept me in court almost daily. But I was coming in contact with human nature in this counselship, and with stories of human suffering which kept my emotions at high tide, and the lenses of my inner eye magnified and polished.All these stresses made it necessary for me to write the Anthology at odd times, such as Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Subjects, characters, dramas came into my mind faster than I could write them. Hence I was accustomed to jot down the ideas, or even the poems on backs of envelopes, margins of newspapers, when I was on the street car, or in court, or at luncheon, or at night after I had gone to bed. These notes were then amplified, and copied at large on big sheets of paper, which on Monday morning, as a rule, I took to my office, where my secretary, Jacob Prassel, an intelligent German youth, awaited me with smiles to see what I had done; and then, taking the sheets, he would turn to his typewriter and make a manuscript of faultless workmanship.
There was nothing new about free verse except in the minds of illiterate academicians and quiet formalists like William Dean Howells, who called SpoonRiver "shredded prose." Reedy understood all these things as well as I. He knew that Imagism was not a new thing, though he kept urging me to make the Anthology more imagistic, and I refused, except where imagism as vivid description in the Shakespearean practice was called for. I had had too much study in verse, too much practice too, to be interested in such worthless experiments as polyphonic prose, an innovation as absurd as Dadaism or Cubism or Futurism or Unanimism, all grotesqueries of the hour, and all worthless, since they were without thought, sincerity, substance.