A review by dotorsojak
Spoon River Antologia by Edgar Lee Masters

3.0

This is reputedly one of the great classics of American poetry and it's pretty good. My 3 star rating is based on the book's reputation, which is to say I'm holding it to a higher standard than I might do if it were not so famous. The book is a collection of about 240 verse portraits of people buried on the "hill," a fictional cemetery, modeled on Oak Hill Cemetery outside Lewistown, IL. Indeed, if you go to Lewistown, you can get a brochure and walking tour that identifies some of the gravestones of some characters from SRA. Oak Hill Cemetery is about three miles from the nearest bend of the actual Spoon River. The book is a little like Sherwood Anderson's WINESBURG OHIO, though obviously Anderson's book is prose fiction and came later. I wonder if Anderson was consciously modeling on SRA. Some similarities to Edwin Arlington Robinson too. Anyhow, there's some great stuff here, though also a good bit of lumbering, self conscious verse as well. Masters was clearly an admirer of Walt Whitman (one of his characters, Petit the Poet, exclaims: "Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, / While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?"), and there are lots of other writers mentioned. Masters was well read and he seems especially entranced by ancient Greek writers. Anyhow, here are some of my favorites: "Pauline Barrett" (a wife who maybe commits suicide after a long period recovery from surgery), "Sarah Brown" (about a woman who unrepentantly committed adultery and even in death claims love for both men), "Batterton Dobyns" (about a man who is jealous of his wife's easy and prosperous life after he worked himself to death), "Amelia Garrick" (a woman is sure that she "vanquished" the spirit of another woman--implied lesbianism here?), "Ippolit Konovaloff" (about a philosophizing gunsmith, originally from the Ukraine), "Widow McFarlane" (a weaver of carpets who compares village life to a loom measuring out each denizen's short time on earth), "Petit the Poet" (mentioned above), and "The Circuit Judge," (who realizes his own guilt even though he sentenced men to be hanged).