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A review by ladyday540
Spoon River Antologia by Edgar Lee Masters
5.0
Full disclosure: I originally gave this collection of poems four stars. Divorced from my genuine love and nostalgia for this drama in verse, I know its limitations: it's uneven and didactic at times, with an unnecessary Spooniad and epilogue. But as I started to write a review, I kept going back to what makes this collection so singular, so ahead of its time: all of the people who grace its pages are dead and alive simultaneously, voicing a poetry of the betweenlife, a poetics that rejects salvation in favor of a psychological purgatory. When I first read this book over 17 years ago, I wondered how the hell Masters made a collection of short, small town epitaphs so vital and warm-blooded. This reading, I was left wondering the same.
Is this the most important book of poetry ever written? Are its form and premise still quite so radical or shocking? No. But I eventually changed my review to five stars because this collection was truly groundbreaking, setting the stage for so many texts that have shaped our modern understanding of death, including Thornton Wilder's Our Town and, most recently, Six Feet Under. Plus, there are some damn good poems. Beyond the usual anthologized suspects - Lucinda Matlock, George Grey - there are the dark masterpieces of Mrs. Sibley, Editor Whedon, and Edith Conant. Or Mabel Osborne, shunned for a reason we know not, calling out a community who ignored her: "you who knew and saw me perish before you,/Like this geranium which someone has planted over me,/And left to die." Whether they're calling out their community, themselves, or the reader, Spoon River voices will not be ignored. We will listen.
Is this the most important book of poetry ever written? Are its form and premise still quite so radical or shocking? No. But I eventually changed my review to five stars because this collection was truly groundbreaking, setting the stage for so many texts that have shaped our modern understanding of death, including Thornton Wilder's Our Town and, most recently, Six Feet Under. Plus, there are some damn good poems. Beyond the usual anthologized suspects - Lucinda Matlock, George Grey - there are the dark masterpieces of Mrs. Sibley, Editor Whedon, and Edith Conant. Or Mabel Osborne, shunned for a reason we know not, calling out a community who ignored her: "you who knew and saw me perish before you,/Like this geranium which someone has planted over me,/And left to die." Whether they're calling out their community, themselves, or the reader, Spoon River voices will not be ignored. We will listen.