Customer Reviews

Spoon River Anthology - Literary Touchstone Classic

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This is a magnificent collection of short prose and monologues. It's the entire collection and not the stage version (the stage version is condensed and doesn't include all the pieces). All the pieces are given by characters who have come back from the grave to tell a short annecdote about themselves while alive. Some are humorous, some are tragic, and some are moralistic. Most characters are fictitious, but some are not. This is a classic peice of work and extremely well written.

It's wonderful that a new volume of the Spoon River Anthology has been published after many years. The print is excellent, the size is perfect (a trade paperback.) Edgar Lee Masters' characterizations are timeless, insightful, and beautifully written.

Spoon River is a truly classic collection of creative storytelling and universal emotion. Each character's voice further stimulates the imagination and helps to paint the picture of this fictitious yet very real town. This book is also a gift to actors and theater lovers everywhere. When I was in acting school, I was lucky enough to be assigned the "monologue" of the Lois Spears character (the gratefully blessed blind woman). This was an amazing experience for me as was being introduced to this lovely book.
-Christine Whitmarsh

This really is a classic. Each poem is a person's story, usually one of pain and isolation. It could well serve as the basis for a multi-monologue play. Those who enjoyed this book might want to consider reading Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio." It's prose, but similarly a tale of many characters, who are similarly living lives of pain and isolation.

You won't find Spoon River, Illinois on any map (well, technically there's a Spoon River but it refers to a river and not a town) but it's about as American as you can get.

Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology joins with a handful of other works - notably Thorton Wilder's "Our Town" and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio - as tapestries of America's triumphs and tragedies, it's character and it's occasional flaws. Each of these works - a play, a book of connected short stories and Masters' collection of free-form poems - speak volumes about the American experience.

In Spoon River Anthology Masters lets his characters speak from beyond the grave. In essence, they are writing their own epitaphs with theire joys and tears. With the exception of Anne Rutlegde, the purported first girlfriend of a young Abraham Lincoln, all the characters are fictional, but in a few brief lines Masters is able to give the a voice and let them spring fully fleshed from their graves to recount their lives.

These are not always men and women who have found a source of great profundidty in their lives (though some have managed that feat). Some of them are bitter and complain that their graves are not kept up properly. Others are doomed to forever ponder the choices they made in life. Others are soliders who have seen the follies and the glories of warfare up close. But all are able to teach us something, even if sometimes the lessons are hard.

I've loved this collection every since I first discovered it in high school and even before I re-read Spoon River Anthology I could still recall some of my favorite characters like Fiddler Jones who "ended up with a broken fiddle - and a broken laugh, and a thousand memories, and not a single regret" and Lucinda Matlock's admonishment: "What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, anger, discontent and drooping hopes? Dengenerate sons and daughters, Life is too strong for you - It takes like to love life."

First 8 poems have very incorrect line breaks. Then page print becomes so small one would need a magnifying glass to read it. Avoid this edition.

I really enjoy this book. It is rather serious, but quite beautiful. I am writing to let others know that this particular kindle edition has serious problems. Every once in a while a poem appears in extremely tiny font. It has nothing to do with the user font adjustments - you cannot adjust this problem away. Furthermore, the formatting is terrible. Line breaks are not coded in properly. I know this because i ultimately tested and bought a different kindle version - these look like poetry, with formatting as intended.

Highly recommend that you buy a different kindle version if you want to kindle this great series of poems.

By the way this is not really simply a series of poems but a developing story, with plot twists, that is formulated as a series of brief epitaphs.

". . .What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you--
It takes life to love Life."

So speaks Lucinda Matlock on page 239 in an earlier edition of this book. What comes before is 238 pages of despair. . .more despair. . .all despair. It is all ugliness: the reminiscenses of the drunks, the cruel, the broken of small town American; the confessions of its corrupt and its envious; the sights of a courthouse arson, the fetuses washed into the river. . .

I can't think of anything more depressing than this "poetic" picture of crushed Americans. This is too strong for me.