Customer Reviews

Spoon River Anthology (Dover Thrift Editions)

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

There is no Spoon River, IL. Check your map. Several towns argue that they stake their claim in being what Masters asserted to be this mythical town. Petersburg and Lewistown, two towns of otherwise minor repute seem closest... but it is so much better we haven't an actual town... Spoon River's residents are our next door neighbors, whether we live in Central Illinois or Central Florida, or southern Alaska.

Masters has written not fables, but the essence of American life. He hasn't captured the life and times of 1915, but has instead recorded in 1915 the life and times of our present day America.

The same reason the paintings of Norman Rockwell makes sense is why Edgar Lee Masters poetry makes sense. To read the quick messages on the gravestone of one man, learning a little bit him, and something about a neighbor or two, we can learn a little about how we live in communities today.

Our lives, like Jimmy Stewart's character in "It's a Wonderful Life" found out, interact and impact everyone we meet. Who we love, who we should love and who we reject. And when we die, others feel the loss. Masters has aptly put this in a humorous, yet insightful way into short verses.

The poems don't rhyme. The meter is not solid, and the poetics aren't intricate. They aren't poems like Poe's or Dickinson, not in the way they wrote American poems. Don't expect iambic pentameter-based sonnets or villanelles. Expect a conversation, and listen in.

The poetry here is in the subtle use of social nuance. In the nuances are his insight and wit. Two readings will bring to light what you miss in the first.

Buy this book, read it slow. It reads faster than most poetry book, but don't get caught in the temptation to zoom through each poem just because you can.

After you read it, see the play if it happens to be performed in your town.

I fully recommend it.

Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com

Spoon River Anthology is an American Classic. It has touched me since my grandfather read parts of it to me more than thirty years ago. Ostensibly it is a collection of autobiographical poems of the silent inhabitants of the town's graveyard. The broad theme, the book's strategy, is the great sweep of what America was like in the nineteenth century. The stories of their lives; joys and sorrows, successes and failures, loves and hates, and secrets of those people in the graveyard are the tactics. Above all, E.L. Masters exposes the hypocrisy and denial in which people have always lived their lives. Even today, in a much worldlier time than the turn of the century when it was written, the brutal honesty of the citizens shakes our complacency. This is no mellow reflection on the good old days. Its citizens corrupt and are corrupted. They suffer loveless marriages. Men run away to war to escape jail or rejection in love, women suffer stifling lack of opportunity and equality. The citizens die in childbirth or from lockjaw contracted from a cut by a rusty knife. Yet in reading about these lives we understand a little more about what it is to be human. None of us could fail to find some stories that in ways match ours to a greater or lesser extent. An in doing so, be granted in life the level of insight into ourselves and others that these storytellers achieved only after their lives had ended.

I use the Dover edition at Buckhannon-Upshur High School with my ninth grade students each spring. Even the kids who say they hate poetry end up liking this book. We read the poems as pieces of a puzzle, trying to put the people and their problems together. We only get about one third of the book done in class, but most of the students read more on their own time. There's a new one--students reading for pleasure!

Okay, okay, we know it's a true classic of American Literature, but why should you buy the Annotated Edition? Well, annotations, for one thing. The added layers of understanding are well worth the extra $. Plus, it's a really nice trade paperback. It just looks classier than some newsprinty mass market.

I am a high school student, i had a list of books to chose from and i chose this one. This is one of the best books i've ever had to read in high school. I like reading about people and learning how they died and what their life was like. Spoon river antholagies is a book you will pick up and not be able to put down. I'm really glad i read it, and i'll read it over and over again. Reading this book helped me to get better at reading and understanding poetry.

America has had many great poets, any short list of American poets would include Longfellow, Whitman, Poe, Dickinson, and Frost. Regrettably, Edgar Lee Masters would not be on many of those lists.

It is a shame because Spoon River Anthology is such an American collection of poems. Masters is as a poet, what Norman Rockwell is as a painter: a man who captured the spirit of America. An exercise in Americana? Undoubtedly. But Master's is not whose eye were blind to the faults and foibles of America.

His America, embodied in Spoon River, IL, is an America with faults, with problems; it is at the same time an America with hope with a future and at its core--a basically good nation.

If for no other reason, I am an advocate of Masters because he is the poet who made me fall in love with poetry.

I am now 36 years old. I read this book Christmas break 1985. Mr. Bingham my English teacher had given it to the class to read over the break. I read this book cover to cover in one sitting.
What it meant to me? I can't summarize it in this setting, but it made me appreciate my life and my place in this world.
More than any other book it gave me focus, determination and awe of the lives we touch.
I am now a surgeon and i can't tell you how many of my patients come in like characters from this book. And i listen and look at them with the same awe i read twenty years prior.

Upon its release Edgar Lee Masters' collection of free verse poems must have shaken the literary universe. In an era when the mores of polite Victorianism were still lingering in an America concerned with all things proper, Masters dared pen a book in which the dead of a small Midwestern town lie not in a state of reservation before Christian resurrection, but in a condition of stasis, ruminating on their lives and speaking with candor on all they may have done. The dead who speak from their graves in these wondrous poems reveal their secrets, their unfulfilled dreams, their disapprobation at humanity's conduct. The dead are to varying degrees wise, ironic, witty, bitter, content, confused, and moralistic. They have regrets, they mock the values of we who are living, they seethe with longing, they confess universal truths at long last, they await they know not what, the arrival of eternity or a continuation of their suspended state of evaluation, in conditions of calm, content, fright, or regretless joy. There is one thing none of those who have passed away from the streets of Spoon River to its hallowed acre on the hill, are and that is quiet.

One of a dozen or so American poetical achievements that most fully justifies our nation's pride in its own literary accomplishments.

Spoon River Anthology is one of the books that everybody who loves literature ought to read. Even though the Editorial Board of the Modern Library didn't include it in their top 100 list, it belongs there. Like Our Town which came later, Spoon River Anthology captures the small town perspective and like Winesburg, Ohio (which did make the Modern Library list) it evokes another time and place which contain the roots of many of us today. This book is very rewarding.

The wondrous folksinger, Claudia Schmidt composed a song with that line in it and since I read this back in college, her song spoke to me. The recent Richard Buckner CD (The Hill) was loaned by a friend who didn't know who Masters was nor had heard of SRA, and it too is outstanding. The town of Spoon River is indeed fictive, though there is a Spoon River Community College near Peoria. The characters were real enough, however, to be very angry at ELM for generations following publication. A college roomate descended from one such family (he's from Pekin) and the mere mention of Mr. Masters name evoked strong responses similar to how parts of my family (from GA) don't allow the name Sherman in conversation. That obviously means Edgar got it right. It is a fine book, on par with another fav, To Kill A Mockingbird, and it will become one for your permanent collection.