One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart’s desire,
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag[.]
It is not only women who are the pawns of sex. In “Benjamin Pantier,” which may reflect Masters’s unhappiness in his first marriage, the speaker describes himself as being snared by convention, all the while tormented by his uncontrollable urge for other women: “Then she, who survives me, snared my soul / With a snare which bled me to death, / Till I, once strong of will, lay broken, indifferent [.]”
Edgar Lee Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas, in 1869, where his parents had temporarily relocated from Illinois. One of the prairie poets along with Hamlin Garland, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, Masters was also part of the Chicago Renaissance that included Sandburg, Dreiser, Floyd Dell, and others. He grew up in Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois. After a year at nearby Knox College, he relocated to Chicago, originally intending to become a newspaper reporter but ultimately establishing himself as a prominent lawyer. Most of the poems in Spoon River Anthology are loosely based on people he knew growing up in these two Midwestern towns, in the shadow of Lincoln country, haunted by legends like Lincoln’s purported first love affair with Anne Rutledge. It became the subject of the most famous poem in Spoon River Anthology:
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!
Even after his father, Hardin Masters, left Petersburg to establish a new law practice in Lewistown, young Masters continued to visit his paternal grandparents, Lucinda and Squire Davis Masters, on their farm outside Petersburg. It was from his grandfather, whom Masters cherished as the ideal American with roots deeply thrust into the soil of democracy, that he ultimately developed neo-Confederate sympathies that would often surface in what eventually became more than fifty volumes of poetry, plays, political essays, and biographies.
Both paternal grandparents make appearances in Spoon River Anthology (Lucinda and Davis Matlock, Aaron Hatfield). Masters recalls in his autobiography, Across Spoon River (1936), that Squire Davis, as a member of the Illinois legislature, had voted against Lincoln for the Senate in 1854. Petersburg, located on the Sangamon River in Menard County, represented for Masters the tradition and life of the South before America was incorporated as a result of the Civil War and the decline of agrarian values. As he wrote in Spoon River’s “Jacob Goodpasture” (the surname rather clumsily suggesting agrarian goodness):
When Fort Sumter fell and the war came
I cried out in bitterness of soul:
"O glorious republic now no more!”
Masters’s paternal roots went back to the states of Tennessee and Virginia, whereas the maternal side of his heritage originated in New England. His mother’s political background, or cultural point of view, was best represented for Masters in Lewistown, five miles from the Spoon River, and thirty miles or so northwest of Petersburg. As he recalled in “The Genesis of Spoon River,” published in 1933 in his friend H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, Lewistown was a community “where political lines were bitterly drawn by the G. A. R. [Grand Army of the Republic], . . . and where New England and Calvinism waged a death struggle on the matter of Prohibition and the church with the Virginians and free livers.” His father, Hardin Masters, opposed Prohibition and most restrictions on personal liberty, while his wife favored a more puritanical approach to life.
Indeed, this South-North division between Petersburg and Lewistown was reflected in the tensions in the marriage of his parents. In his autobiography, Masters expresses mixed feelings not only about his parents but also about his sister and others that would form the basis of the bitterness found in the lives of his fictional characters. He clearly favored his father over his mother and came to admire his father’s tenacity at opposing hypocrisy wherever he found it. Yet he was first inspired to write Spoon River poems in conversations with his mother. “In our talks now,” he wrote, “we went over the whole past of Lewistown and Petersburg, bringing up characters and events that had passed from my mind. We traced these persons to their final fates, to the positions in life that they were then in.”
Masters, who achieved poetic fame with free verse and a naturalistic theme, first formed his interest in poetry by studying the classics mostly on his own and reading such English romantic poets as Shelley and Keats. He soon discovered Whitman along with Ralph Waldo Emerson—eventually writing or editing books about each. Even though these two writers came from the North, Masters found in them the same commitment to pioneer values and an allegiance to nature and the land that he admired in the Illinois people he knew. He also read the works of William Cullen Bryant and Edgar Allan Poe, among other American poets. As Masters wrote in Across Spoon River about this time in his literary and political development, he began to see that he had a passion for democracy, which he also inherited from his father, “and that my father’s democracy and integrity were the roots out of which my devotion to Shelley’s poetry took immediate nourishment. And to what ends Shelley led me! To more metaphysics, to Plato, to the Greek writers.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that Edgar Lee Masters gave himself utterly to a life of poetry, even while spending the first twenty or so years of his adult life as a Chicago attorney who handled mostly labor cases. He was in the middle of a huge legal case involving striking waitresses when he finally began to turn out the epitaphs that would make up his magnum opus. For this and earlier poetic works, he had generally written under a pseudonym to protect his law practice. It hadn’t really mattered, however, because none of his books attracted much attention until he published Spoon River Anthology, which ironically he never considered his finest poetic achievement because it was not written in conventional verse. He thought his best work was Doomsday Book (1920), a poetic chronicle written in blank verse and set in World War I.
William Marion Reedy, a leftist editor who had published one of Dreiser’s earliest short stories in the Mirror in 1901, encouraged Masters to contribute his epigrammatic poems to his magazine, where they began to appear on May 29, 1914. Clusters of them appeared throughout 1914 and part of 1915, when Masters finally dubbed himself as “Webster Ford” and published the collection (though in a different arrangement) in book form. The 1915 edition contained 214 pieces, including “The Spooniad” (Reedy’s Mirror, December 18, 1914), described in the volume as a fragment of a planned epic in twenty-four books by Jonathan Swift Somers, “laureate of Spoon River.” Masters said at the time that he could have gone on writing his epitaphs, and in 1916 he issued an “augmented edition” with illustrations by Oliver Herford that had an additional thirty-one epitaphs and the “Epilogue,” which opens with a game of checkers in which Life is “checked by Death.” Following the match, a Satanic figure sounds a trumpet to assemble all the dead of Spoon River.
Masters’s writing of Spoon River Anthology was sometimes compared to Whitman’s writing Leaves of Grass. Whitman appears in Spoon River as a heroic counterexample to the pitiful “Petit, the Poet” (obviously a satirical self-portrait of the young Masters himself), whose “little iambics” tick on “While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines.” With Spoon River, Masters gave up the “tick, tick, tick” of his earlier “faint iambics” and tried to join the immortal Whitman. And while today Masters is no longer considered Whitman’s literary equal, he is in fact just as important as a literary innovator. Whereas Whitman, in the words of Ezra Pound, “broke the new wood” of poetry by writing about the miracle of the common in free verse, Masters opened up the naturalistic tradition in American literature. Indeed, it is Masters instead of Sherwood An
derson who was the first American writer to introduce psychological naturalism. In the earlier form of naturalism, adversity comes from external forces such as poverty, crime, or sickness, whereas in psychological naturalism the enemy is as much within as without, indeed more so.
As the village or small town began to reappear in American literature, whether as Spoon River or Winesburg, it was no longer viewed as a refuge from the brute external forces found in the city. The voices that speak in Spoon River Anthology describe themselves as victims of their own hunger for life and its consequences. “There are two hundred and forty-four characters in the book . . . nineteen stories developed by interrelated portraits,” Masters wrote in “The Genesis of Spoon River.” “Practically every human occupation is covered.” He anticipated works featuring the revolt from the village, not only in Lewis’s Main Street but Anderson’s Winesburg,Ohio, where Doc Reefy in “Paper Pills” is clearly anticipated by Masters’s “Doc Hill,” based in part on the Masterses’ family physician. Wilder’s play Our Town not only takes the idea of the living dead directly from Spoon River Anthology, but borrows a line from “Lucinda Matlock” and credits Masters not by name but as merely “one of those Middle West poets.”
“I am robbed all the time,” the aging poet complained to Gerald Sanders, a would-be compiler of his primary bibliography at Eastern Michigan College, in 1941. By this time Masters had already given his all for poetry (and the accompanying ego). He had divorced his first wife, moved permanently to New York City in 1923, married a woman thirty years his junior the following year, sired a son (the writer Hilary Masters) by her in 1928, and lived a nearly hand-to-mouth existence at the Chelsea, then a cheap residential hotel for artists and writers at 222 West Twenty-third Street in New York. By this time he had become, or resembled, one of the vanquished in his Spoon River Anthology. In one of the final epitaphs of “Webster Ford,” he had alluded to the challenges of heredity and environment—“When I seemed to be turned to a tree with trunk and branches / Growing indurate, turning to stone, yet burgeoning[.]” He was eking out an existence from his writing, never coming close to his earlier economic success in literature (not to mention the law) except for the brief popularity of The New Spoon River in 1924. Spoon River Anthology, the play based on the 1915 work that continues to be performed by high school and college thespians today, did not debut on Broadway until the late 1960s, long after Masters’s death.
By the beginning of World War II, Masters had been eclipsed by such contemporary poets as Edwin Arlington Robinson and especially Robert Frost, whose first three books had originally been overshadowed by Spoon River Anthology. Masters came to despise Louis Untermeyer, an editor of poetry anthologies and a minor poet who vigorously promoted Frost over Masters. Masters believed that most Eastern poets were in a natural conspiracy against the bards of the Midwest. He had become embittered at the decline of his reputation and saddened at the lack of collegiality he expected from fellow poets, something he himself didn’t always extend to others. He thought he would be welcomed into the parliament of poets that Keats and Shelley wrote about, his son told this writer in 2006, but he found ultimately only “ridicule and frosty responses.” “I have done nothing in my life that was not a service in the devotion to Apollo,” Masters told a friend in the 1920s, “since I was seventeen years of age.”
Hilary Masters, his last son, has written eloquently in Last Stands, a family memoir that has been called “something of a miniature Spoon River,” of his life growing up with the aging poet and his second wife, Ellen Coyne. Sixty when he became a father for the fourth time, Masters seldom saw his son afterward except in the summer when young Hilary was brought East from his maternal grandparents’ home in Kansas City. When the boy was eight years old, his father wrote him, “Perhaps, and this hurts, I should have given up writing, and devoted my time to you. That might have been a contribution to America better than I have made by isolating myself to do it. Who knows?” By this time, this “one-book author,” as he has been called, was the author of forty-four volumes. He wrote in every genre, even children’s literature in Mitch Miller (1920), the story about a boyhood friend who was killed while trying to hitch a ride on a train.
His autobiography, Across Spoon River, finally appeared in 1937, but most of it had been written in the 1920s and held back because of a lack of a publisher. Finally, Ellen Coyne helped prepare a copy that was publishable in the sense of not being too exact in its use of names and other details that might embarrass people still living. (In fact, Clarence Darrow, who was Masters’s law partner from 1903 to 1911, is never mentioned by name because the two became bitter enemies after Darrow served as the divorce lawyer for Helen Jenkins Masters.) The story it presents concludes in 1917, and in one way the life—the literary life—of Edgar Lee Masters came to an effective close at that point, at least in terms of any critical success approaching the magnitude of Spoon River Anthology. Nonetheless, he continued to produce a volume almost every year of his life. Masters wrote easily and eloquently, but unfortunately he wrote too fast—composing Mitch Miller, for example, in just under two weeks. He had also written Spoon River quickly (and the uneven quality is apparent even there), but the originality of those poems was now missing. Ironically, he had taken much more care in preparing his legal briefs, knowing perhaps that they would fall under heavier scrutiny than his more subjective literary work.
Edgar Lee Masters also wrote four biographies of American writers, two of which were warm appreciations of the figures and two of which were attacks. The subjects were (in the order of discussion) Vachel Lindsay, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and Mark Twain. Taken together, they form a kind of anthology of major American voices in contrast to the anonymous voices of Spoon River. They also fill in some of the interstices to understanding the complexity of political opinions and poetic feelings that formed the voice of this uniquely talented American poet. Indeed, his disapproval of the America that survived the Civil War clearly anticipates the anger of American poets like Allen Ginsberg and others during the Eisenhower fifties and the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam War era. In both cases, the political became openly linked with the poetical.
At the urging of Vachel Lindsay’s widow (after Lindsay committed suicide in 1931), Masters wrote an authorized biography of the author of General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems (1913). Like Masters, Lindsay hailed from Lincoln country in Illinois, from Springfield in fact. Along with Masters and Sandburg, he was known as one of the exponents of the “new poetry” so disparaged by Howells and other Victorian critics still tied to the merits of rhyme and meter. Masters and Lindsay had known each other personally, though admittedly the paths of the two poets had diverged, for while Masters defended the economically downtrodden in Chicago, Lindsay had devoted his early life to tramping around the country, trading poems for food. Such an itinerant poet’s life made for interesting reading, and Vachel Lindsay:A Poet in America (1935) is still considered a valuable part of the scholarship on this poet.
Although it lacked the original research of the Lindsay biography, Masters’s Whitman (1937) is a poet’s appreciation of an equal in American letters. He very much admired the Poet of Democracy’s Western sensibilities, though he is probably the earliest biographer to openly express bewilderment over Whitman’s sexual orientation. He visited the poet’s last residence on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, during his research for the biography. On the back cover of his dust jacket Masters is pictured standing in ramrod posture on the front stoop to Whitman’s humble abode. As he was with Dreiser, Masters was disappointed in what he perceived to be Whitman’s lack of knowledge of the classics (an erroneous view due to Whitman’s decision not to sing of Old World themes). Yet the rigid, almost military pose suggests both his respect for as well as his identification with Whitman’s greatness as a poet. The photograph harkens back to a similar image that adorned the March 4, 1916, front page of the Literary Digest under the headline, “Another Walt Whitman.” Ma
sters, it has been said, did not “look like” a poet. In the dust-jacket photo, he dons coat and tie and looks down into the camera with the hauteur of somebody whose political heroes were Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, men of principle instead of individuals of pragmatism and compromise like Lincoln and Twain.
In Lincoln: The Man (1931), the poet fell back on his grandfather’s dislike of the sixteenth president and wrote—in the words of Masters’s biographer—“a series of family biases made public.” “The time has arrived,” the memoir opened, “when [Lincoln’s] apotheosis can be touched with the hand of rational analysis.” He blames Lincoln for starting the Civil War, suggesting that he was a closet abolitionist all along, and sees him as a symbol of the centralized government, which could only be erected, citing John C. Calhoun, on “the ruins of liberty.” If Stephen Douglas had become president, he argued, the war would have been averted. He adopts Whitman’s own position well before the war that chattel slavery was a small evil compared to “loss of reason and free speech.”
At the turn of the twentieth century Masters favored free silver, or the silver standard as part of the basis of our currency, and he had thrilled to William Jennings Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic convention for president in Chicago. After hearing it, he dedicated himself to the common man it supported. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” he quoted Bryan’s famous words in his autobiography, “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The gold standard, which soon prevailed, had devastating effects on farmers, workers, and small-business people, and it is often cited as a contributing factor to the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression. It was during the early years of the Depression, and just a year before the United States abandoned the gold standard, that Masters wrote his biography of a Lincoln who had set in motion, in Masters’s opinion, the replacement of the dignity of the individual for a nation of empire and privilege.