There are 244 separate monologues in the book dating back to the Revolutionary War, and they proceed up to the early part of the 20th century (the book was published in 1915). Except for his intellectuals and poets (and these strike me as some of the weaker poems in the collection) death has lent everyone the same, simple eloquence. And how shall the soul of a man / Be larger than the life he has lived?' Masters, as you can see from the quotes, does not write realistically in the voices of his characters. 'Now I,' he writes, 'an under-tenant of the earth, can see / That the branches of a tree / Spread no wider than its roots. Trying to grow.Samuel, the gardener, has his monologue on the facing page. Look, Samuel, where the roots have struck rock, Nor destroying insect, as the sexton thinks. I, who dug all the ditches about Spoon River. It is often the plainest monologues that are the most haunting:īut I did not need to die to learn about roots: Death has brought a certain insight for a few of them but most continue to strike the attitudes they adopted in life: they nurse grievances, blame their tormentors, and justify their actions to each other and to us. The dead know what has happened in the town since their deaths - 'Do you remember, passer-by,' one man says, 'the path I wore across the lot where now stands the opera house' - and about the other townspeople who have joined them under the hill.

The book consists of a series of short monologues by the inhabitants of a graveyard in a small Illinois town, all written in free verse. Not many people talk about it today, but I don't think it has lost any of its appeal over the years. It is rare among classics of American poetry in actually having enjoyed, immediately, the popularity it deserved, and it even seems to have been a success in translation. The Anthology is one of the few books of poetry that I would confidently recommend to people who don't normally read poetry. I was reading a handful of books at the same time as the Spoon River Anthology, and it succeeded in winning my time away from its competitors and being finished first, which is definitely a sign of a certain kind of literary merit, and an especially impressive achievement for a book of verse.

George gray spoon river