[.ca] Spoon River Anthology (ISBN 0743255070)

It's a great book:
I am a high school student, i had a list of books to chose from and i chose this one. This is one of the best books i've ever had to read in high school. I like reading about people and learning how they died and what their life was like. Spoon river antholagies is a book you will pick up and not be able to put down. I'm really glad i read it, and i'll read it over and over again. Reading this book helped me to get better at reading and understanding poetry.

If the dead could talk:
Edgar Lee Masters's "Spoon River Anthology" is a poem in long form comprising over two hundred free-verse sketches, each representing and narrated by a deceased resident of a fictional town located on the Spoon River in western Illinois. The dead talk not so much about their town as they do about themselves and the pivotal events that either transformed their lives or caused their deaths. Like Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," the book exposes the depression, restlessness, and corruption that lurk behind the facade of small-town middle American sanctity with an almost constant focus on death that makes it even more grim. If you're looking for something cheerful to read, you might want to pass on this. "Spoon River Anthology" has perhaps the highest character-to-page ratio of any work in literature. Many of the narratives are interrelated in the sense that different people involved in a particular situation present their respective arguments which may be defensive apologies or rationalizations or vindictive taunts. The names of the characters are often indicative of their personalities; appellations like Isaiah Beethoven, Voltaire Johnson, and Percy Bysshe Shelley show that Spoon River is hardly a haven for subtlety. The most commonly mentioned character is the wealthy Thomas Rhodes, the failure of whose bank had caused financial ruin to many of the town's residents, although we learn later that the culpability rests with his son Ralph's bad loans and speculations. George Reece, the innocent cashier, took the rap and was sent to prison; his wife in her narrative advises the reader of her epitaph to "memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty." She did so herself, taking a line from Alexander Pope, which enabled her to raise her children "clean and strong" in the face of hardship. In Spoon River, lives of quiet desperation result in a cemetery of yapping corpses, lamenting wasted youth and lost chances. Margaret Fuller Slack tells us that she aspired to be a novelist "as great as George Eliot" but marriage and motherhood cost her all of her time; her death from lockjaw is "ironical" because presumably she had so much to say. Searcy Foote confesses remorselessly that he murdered his invalid aunt for money and personal freedom. Zilpha Marsh, the ouija-board reader, was regarded as a fool when she would report to the townspeople that she had made contact with the spirit of a notorious figure from the past; the present tense of her narrative suggests that she is unaware that now she, too, is merely in the past. Every single narrative in this fantastic collection is worthy of commentary; to mention just a few risks a skewed impression of the whole because the "Anthology" really must be read in its entirety to grasp its context. However, there is one more feature which must be noted: The "Anthology" ends with a fragment of an epic poem by Jonathan Swift Somers, one of the deceased. Apparently it is a parody of the Iliad, and naturally it is called the Spooniad, drawing a parallel between the fall of Troy and that of Rhodes's bank. Somers did not live to complete this ambitious project, which is just as well since in Spoon River death affords a distinction few living poets can hope to attain.

Great teaching tool:
I use this book in my English 8 classrooms to discuss character sketches and reading and understanding poetry. The students love that it's "kinda" dark and morbid. I like it because the students can focus on one person on "the hill" and not be worried with numerous characters and settings. I've used it in both 8th and 10th grade and the writing that comes from the reading of these poems is amazing.

Arguably the greatest work of American literature:
A person could read this marvelous literary effort as a series of free-verse poems depicting individual voices from the grave who can finally speak honestly, protected by the shadow of death. But to read this work in such a manner is to avoid its essence. Read more carefully. Spoon River Anthology is a timeless portrait of the human story. Each character is different, yet all are part of the composite of a small town. It could have been a big city or a widespread area with few people. The stories would differ in fact, perhaps, but the tale would be same. You will meet over a hundred matchless, never-to-be-forgotten characters, including George Gray, who wasted his life by shrinking from it, A.D. Blood, the town prohibitionist, who hated liquor so much he killed a man who was drunk, a politician, Hamilton Greene, whose mother was actually a servant girl to his father, but who never knew it, people who scorned life and were scorned by it in turn, people who loved life despite its adversity, people who wantonly ruined the lives of others, people who were dashed against life's shoals by the ruthless, people who were buried in the wrong grave, and on, and on, and on. Each page is a precious gem reflecting someone you know, or even part of you, large or small. The English is beyond merely superb. It is simply scintillating, and so astoundingly good in terms of word and vocabulary selection as to leave the reader amazed. One facet that was most enjoyable was the number of attorneys and judges who spoke. Masters, of course, practiced law for a number of years, and used this experience to depict realistic portraits of many lawyers, all of whom anyone in the law knows all to well. Carefully perused, the work is truly a novel, not a mere series of poems, and a great novel. Masters apparently poured his whole being into the effort, since he never remotely produced anything of its quality again. Buy, read it a bit at a time. You will treasure it always. My recommendation is so high as to be off the scale.

A nice stick-it-in-your-pocket edition of a classic:
Inspired by The Greek Anthology, a collection of brief poems from the Hellenistic World including epitaphs written from the perspective of the deceased, Edgar Lee Masters wrote a series of monologues spoken by dead townspeople (some more fictional than others) who inhabited Spoon River, the area in Illinois where Abe Lincoln once lived. Real people include Anne Rutledge (Abe's first girlfriend) and Fiddler Jones, who worked in Lincoln's general store as a boy. But this book isn't about Abraham Lincoln. It's about the trait that we will all, both saints and sinners, one day have in common: death. And it is about the small triumphs of life that the dead remember. Just as William Carlos Williams was a doctor, and his poetry was informed by his contact with everyday people, so too Masters. He was a lawyer and a keen observationist. He writes directly and frankly, especially about male-female relations, which earned this book a bit of a scandalous reputation in its time. Of course, it is mild enough today that the book is assigned reading in junior highs, even in the South. I've read this book three times through, and often re-read individual favorites. And I have it in easy reach on my shelf because I plan to keep re-reading it. There is something about the people of Spoon River and their sentiments that keeps me coming back. As May Swenson says, in her introduction to this edition, Masters "bequeathed to us a world in microcosm." A world, in my opinion, worth exploring again and again.