The Spoon River Anthology Analysis

Every story, poem, or anthology alike has a part of the author’s feelings or past between their lines, which dictates their origins. The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters is not anything different in that regard. Every piece of writing has it’s origins and those origins can be not only interesting, but change the way the reader views the writing. This paper will not only discuss the origins of the famous Anthology, but show Edgar Lee Masters’ personal side of the origins and how those instances influenced his writing of The Spoon River Anthology.

Edgar Lee Masters was born on August 23, 1868 on a Kansas prairie and grew up in two small Illinois cities named Lewistown and Petersburg. “... Masters was firmly rooted in the Midwestern society he both praised and criticized in Spoon River Anthology” (“Edgar Lee Masters”). Due to financial problems, Masters couldn’t complete college but he studied law under his father. He was a lawyer in Chicago for 30 years. Within those years, he began to write poetry and

publish his poems in magazines; however, he had to use multiple pseudonyms to protect his law reputation. “By 1915 he had published four books of poetry, seven plays, and a collection of essays, but none of them had received much critical attention. Then, following the advice of Reedy's Mirror publisher William Marion Reedy, Masters began to experiment with poetic form, bringing to life the sort of people he had known in his boyhood” (“Edgar Lee Masters”). The result was the famous collection of poems, The Spoon River Anthology.
While Masters’ Anthology is one of the most famous of its kind, he wasn’t the first to do such work.

“Masters modeled the Anthology on a collection of ancient Greek short poems and sayings (called the) The Greek Anthology” (Costello). When writing the Anthology, Masters wrote himself in as many different names. “Masters wrote himself into the Spoon River Anthology not only as ‘Webster Ford,’ his pseudonym for the magazine publication of the Anthology, but in a number of other epitaphs as well” (Hurt). This shows his personal attribution to his works. James Hurt writes: “Masters himself repeatedly made clear that the composition of

the Spoon River Anthology coincided with the most important psychological crisis

in his life and that the epitaphs were both an expression of that crisis and a means

of working through it … The characters in the Anthology were not the products of

ordinary memory or nostalgia, but Masters' own ghosts, internalized images

of
primal conflicts dredged up and confronted through the medium of his art.”
Edgar Lee Masters didn’t make completely fictional works - a lot of them were based on his own past experiences and people that he had encountered in his life. That could, argumentally, be one of the reasons that the Spoon River Anthology is popular - even in modern society.
As Masters continued to rapidly produce epitaphs for both the Spoon River Anthology and New Spoon River, his second anthology collection, the reader can see how his mentality changes throughout his writing. “As the writing (of the Anthology) proceeded over an eight-month period, Masters began to experience feelings of possession and depersonalization. He also describes himself… as being in a ‘hypersensitive’ state of ‘clairvoyance and clairaudience,’ and describes a recurring feeling of ‘lightness of body,’ in which he felt he could ‘float to the ceiling’ or ‘drift out the window without falling’ (Hurt). Masters’ mental downfall through the writing of these poems is what brings him to illness and eventually to his deathbed in 1950. “Masters himself points out that the progress of his state of mind during this period can be retraced by examining the order of composition of the poems and their publication in Reedy's magazine” (Hurt). This shows the readers of the Anthology his personal state and shows that he is also human.
In conclusion, all writings show an author’s personal side, whether it is obvious or hidden. Edgar Lee Masters writings changed as his emotional and mental state changed throughout the course of his life. Perhaps the stressful job of being a lawyer didn’t help this aspect. The Spoon River Anthology could have origins that are not currently known to the modern literary scholars. However, what they do know is this - all art has a backstory, whether it’s a character or an author. These factors affect the final work, and that holds true to Masters’ the Spoon River Anthology.