Notes For a Review of The Spoon River Anthology

I saw Masters write this book. He wrote it in snatched moments between fighting injunctions against a waitresses’ union striving for the right to picket and gain one day’s rest a week, battling from court to court for compensation to a railroad engineer rendered a loathsome cripple by the defective machinery of a locomotive, having his life amid affairs as intense as those he writes of.

At The Book and Play Club one night Masters tried to tell how he came to write the Anthology. Of course, he couldn’t tell. There are no writers of great books able to tell the how and why of a dominating spirit that seizes them and wrenches the flashing pages from them. But there are a few forces known that play a part. And among these Masters said he wanted emphasis placed on Poetry, voices calling “Unhand me,” verses and lines from all manner and schools of writers welcomed in Harriet Monroe’s magazine.

Once in a while a man comes along who writes a book that has his own heart-beats in it. The people whose faces look out from the pages of the book are the people of life itself, each trait of them as plain or as mysterious as in the old home valley where the writer came from. Such a writer and book are realized here.

Masters’ home town is Lewiston, Illinois, on the banks of the Spoon River. There actually is such a river where Masters waded bare-foot as a boy, and where the dead and the living folk of his book have fished or swam, or thrown pebbles and watched the widening circles. It is not far, less than a few hours’ drive, from where Abraham Lincoln was raised. People who knew Lincoln are living there today.

Well, some two hundred and twenty portraits in free verse have been etched by Masters from this valley. They are Illinois people. Also they are the people of anywhere and everywhere in so-called civilization.

Aner Clute is the immortal girl of the streets. Chase Henry is the town drunkard of all time. The railroad lawyer, the corrupt judge, the prohibitionist, the various adulterers and adulteresses, the Sunday School superintendent, the mothers and fathers who lived for sacrifice in gratitude, joy,—all these people look out from this book with haunting eyes, and there are baffled mouths and brows calm in the facing of their destinies.

When a few of the pieces in this book reached Ezra Pound, the judgment he passed upon them was that they are real and great poetry from the hand of a new and a genuine American poet. It was Alice Corbin Henderson who was the first American critic to seize upon some of these poems as they were running in The St. Louis Mirror, and put them forward in Poetry as striking, indigenous, out of the soil of America as a home-land. William Marion Reedy, editor of The St. Louis Mirror, is accredited by Masters for the keen enthusiasm with which he helped him carry along the work of writing.

In the year 1914 Masters not only handled all of his regular law practice, heavy and grilling. Besides, he wrote The Spoon River Anthology. There were times when he was clean fagged with the day’s work. But a spell was on him to throw into written form a picture gallery, a series of short movies of individuals he had seen back home. Each page in the anthology is a locked-up portrait now freed.

The stress of this bore down on Masters. Just before the proof sheets for his book came to his hands, he went down with fever and pneumonia and a complex of physical ills. It was the first time in his life he was willing to admit he was “sick abed.”

There is vitality, drops of heart blood, poured into Lee Masters’ book. He has other books in him as vivid and poignant. Let us hope luck holds him by the hand and takes him along where he can write out these other ones.

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From The Little Review, May 1915.