Dramaturgy
Cory Busch
Dramaturg
The Significance of Spoon River
The early days of poetics in the American poetic scene are looked at by scholars as a time of great confusion and shortcomings. Compared to the poetic traditions in countries across the world, it was astonishing that while touting the values of freedom American poets continuously failed to find a voice and write with significance. There was hope that the works of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson would finally create a stir in the literary community, while their works are praised and revered today there was not much interest in their works upon publication, their works did set up inspiration and techniques that would be used by the next generation of poets.
Masters released the Spoon River Anthology in 1915 and was met with immediate critical and commercial success receiving praise from the international literary community alongside the American. Identifying with the “modernist” literary movement, with the release of Spoon River there was an attentive gaze cast upon figures within the movement, suddenly the world was reading poetry from Americans like T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens. In reaction to the birth of popular American poetry, contemporary modernist poet is quoted referring to Masters saying “At last! America has discovered a poet.”
Edgar Lee Masters
Despite being the son of a lawyer and becoming a lawyer himself, Edgar Lee Masters spent most of his life in poverty, this being very noticeable theme sprawling across Masters’ works. Growing up on his grandparent’s farm in Illinois, Masters was always encouraged in his studies by his father likely sparking his passion for the literary arts, even they could not afford the best schooling. He grew up to become a defense attorney preferring to defend impoverished individuals like himself, it is during this time he began publishing poems about the lives of ordinary people in a St. Louis newspaper under the pseudonym Webster Ford, these would later become bound into a complete collection of poems that would be titled Spoon River Anthology.
After its release Edgar Lee Masters was given a significant amount of popularity, not wanting to waste an opportunity he plunged back into writing, but he would never write anything that would be as well received as Spoon River. For his work, Masters was awarded the Mark Twain Silver Medal, Poet Society of America Medal, and the Robert Frost Medal. At age 81, Masters would pass away in poverty on March 5th, 1950. Requesting that the following be put on is tombstone from his poem “To-morrow is My birthday”:
Good friends, let's to the fields ...
After a little walk, and by your pardon,
I think I'll sleep. There is no sweeter thing,
Nor fate more blessed than to sleep.
I am a dream out of a blessed sleep –
Let's walk, and hear the lark.
The Context of Spoon River
While Spoon River is an actual body of water you can visit, you will find no such town bearing its name along it. The town is based upon the greater area of Lewistown, Illinois where Masters grew up on his grandparents farm. The cast of characters written about in Spoon River are fictionalized but heavily constructed from the people Masters remembered from childhood and well through adulthood, however there are a few characters like Hanna Armstrong who are written about precisely as they lived when Masters new them and received their real name as the title of the poem upon publication. The reason for the pseudonyms for people he new in real life was because of his fear of those he wrote about becoming offended at his portrayal of them, a fear that was realized upon the publication of the book, the literary board of Lewistown, Illinois on which Masters’ own mother was a member voted to ban the book. When asked about his feelings toward the ban Masters’ claimed “My mother hated the anthology, my father loved it”.