Freed by the shackles of life, the un-living who “sleep beneath these weeds” confess their deepest secrets, disappointments, frustrations, joys, and warnings to the living in the form of brutally honest free verse poems. In the groundbreaking work, Masters, a onetime law partner of Clarence Darrow, gives voice to more than two hundred deceased citizens of Spoon River who are laid to rest in Oak Hill Cemetery, known to the locals as The Hill. Hallwas, author of Spoon River Anthology: An Annotated Edition.
Comprised of distinctly modern poems that collectively read as a novel, Spoon River Anthology is the story of a quiet midwestern town whose truths and contradictions are celebrated by its dead.“Although such experiences and views were part of American culture, poets had not written about them before,” says John E. Here for the first time was a community that people recognized in its wholeness and complexity. With the publication of Spoon River Anthology Masters exploded the powerful myth that small-town America was a social utopia. Beneath the midwestern values of honesty, community, family, hard work, and chastity, Spoon River Anthology reveals the disillusionment and corruption in modern life. Here is the respected doctor, jailed for swindling here is the chaste wife, rapt with desire here is the pastor, angry and resentful here is the quiet man, filled with unrequited love and devotion.
A collection of poems from the graveyard of a rural Illinois town, Spoon River Anthology poignantly captures the politics, love, betrayals, alliances, hopes, and failures of this small American town. When Spoon River Anthology was published in 1915 it garnered immediate national attention for its truth and its shocking transgression of societal mores.
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