Everyday Canvas

Roaming through Old Books: The New Spoon River Anthology

Every Sunday, I try to skim through or partly read again one of my old books. Today, I have in my hand The New Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. The book is a compilation of poems that brings together the ordinary, mundane, and sometimes eccentric lives of everyday Americans. I think this is an important book as to cultural perspective, and although it is made up parts as a single person per poem, the collection altogether is a whole.

In these people, it is easy to see the strength and the weakness of human character, the total of what made rural Midwest America. Still, the message of the book is universal of subject, place, and time, because the characters in it are so human.

The book I have in my hand is in paperback, second printing, in 1968. By no means a collector’s item. Inside it are, according to my counting, 331 (could be 335) people referred to in verse by name. The first Spoon River Anthology appeared in 1915, and its continuation, The New Spoon River Anthology came to being in 1924, according to what is written in the Introduction by Willis Barnstone.

The feeling I get from the poems in general has to do with light and darkness, satire, doom, and inevitability of life and death; the poet's approach somehow reminds of Sylvia Plath. I don’t find Edgar Lee Masters's poems to be lyrical, but starkly realistic and dramatic.

I must have picked this book subconsciously, since my next Drama Newsletter, which I wrote this morning, has to do with different ways of approaching characterization. Some days my mind works only on one track.

Two Poems From the Anthology:

.I.
Lilah Wood

When The Ledger became a daily,
With Mr. Wood arrived at sixty,
He celebrated his name at the head
Of the editorial column
As editor and owner
By marrying me, who was just nineteen.
And it all seemed happy enough at first,
And full of peace and prestige,
Until I knew of the game of life.
For when I began to rub the lameness
Out of his back, and mix his toddies,
And lie by his side when he was tired,
He whispered the secrets of his strength,
And the secrets of his weakness.
There were two giants, so he said,
The paper mill and the advertisers;
Perhaps there were four, and one was the bank,
And one the telegraph service.
And they almost owned him, and quite controlled him.
And there we sat in an equal fate —
For didn't he own me?

.II.

Emilius Poole

Did you ever see a growth,
Whether of flower or weed,
Break down and waste because of excess of life?
That was I, fellow citizens,
With no work to employ my restless energies,
And fulfill my vision of life.
Say you that the right man finds his work?
What would have become of General Grant
If the war had not come on?
He was sinking into decay,
And was rescued miraculously for himself and the country
By the opportunity of the war.
But no war came for me!