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Spoon River Anthology (Penguin Classics) Paperback – April 29, 2008

by Edgar Lee Masters (Author), Jerome Loving (Contributor)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 186 ratings
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The innovative free verse collection of small-town life that made Edgar Lee Masters a legend

A literary sensation when it appeared in 1915, Spoon River Anthology earned Edgar Lee Masters comparisons to T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman. The characters who speak here tarnish the pure image of their Midwestern hamlet by holding forth from the grave with tales of illicit love affairs, betrayed confidences, political corruption, and miserable marriages. The first serious work of psychological naturalism, this artful indictment of small-town hypocrisy influenced Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, and other luminaries.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    April 29, 2008
  4. Dimensions
    7.76 x 5.08 x 0.67 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    0143105159
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0143105152
  7. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Edgar Lee Masters was born in 1868 in Garnett, Kansas, and was raised in several small towns in Illinois. He long harbored literary ambitions but was trained as a lawyer, and practiced for several years in Chicago with Clarence Darrow. Using a variety of pseudonyms to avoid possible damage to his law practice, Masters began to publish poetry in magazines. 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. Masters then began to experiment with poetic form, bringing to life the sort of people he had known in his Midwestern childhood. The result was Spoon River Anthology, which mixed classical and innovative forms to create a work that critics both praised and scorned for its forthrightness and originality. The book experienced great critical and popular success, and influenced a generation of writers. Although Masters published a sequel to the book and many more works, he never succeeded in producing another volume to match his masterpiece. He died in 1950.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Publishing Group; Reprint edition (April 29, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143105159
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143105152
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.3 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.76 x 5.08 x 0.67 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 186 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
186 global ratings
Cheap edition with missing pages
1 Star
Cheap edition with missing pages
This is a print-on-demand copy, printed on cheap paper, with pages missing at the end. The photo shows the last page. At least Amazon credited my account without asking me to return the book.
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Top reviews from the United States

V. O. Ritter
5.0 out of 5 stars One of My Favorite Books
Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2011
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SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY is one of my favorite books. I first read it in high school as required reading and have read it many times since. It is a book that can be read in bits and pieces or from cover to cover. Many of the characters do bring additional insight to other characters though, so I reccomend cover to cover for the first reading.
My paperback copy was getting ragged and this hardcover version was priced right. Still an enjoyable read, and the characters reveal more depth with each reading. I guess that is why it was required reading !?!?!?
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Andrew S.
5.0 out of 5 stars A Reminder that history is people.
Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2000
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Spoon River Anthology is an American Classic. It has touched me since my grandfather read parts of it to me more than thirty years ago. Ostensibly it is a collection of autobiographical poems of the silent inhabitants of the town's graveyard. The broad theme, the book's strategy, is the great sweep of what America was like in the nineteenth century. The stories of their lives; joys and sorrows, successes and failures, loves and hates, and secrets of those people in the graveyard are the tactics. Above all, E.L. Masters exposes the hypocrisy and denial in which people have always lived their lives. Even today, in a much worldlier time than the turn of the century when it was written, the brutal honesty of the citizens shakes our complacency. This is no mellow reflection on the good old days. Its citizens corrupt and are corrupted. They suffer loveless marriages. Men run away to war to escape jail or rejection in love, women suffer stifling lack of opportunity and equality. The citizens die in childbirth or from lockjaw contracted from a cut by a rusty knife. Yet in reading about these lives we understand a little more about what it is to be human. None of us could fail to find some stories that in ways match ours to a greater or lesser extent. An in doing so, be granted in life the level of insight into ourselves and others that these storytellers achieved only after their lives had ended.
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Andrzej J.
4.0 out of 5 stars Uncompromising distinctness
Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2014
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When you write about a book that's gone through dozens of editions, what should you be focusing on - the content or the presentation? I got the Touchstone edition of Spoon River Anthology because it contains the introduction May Swenson wrote back in 1962, which has been mentioned in a number of articles. I couldn't find it online so I got the book.

Somebody has pointed out that Swenson was perhaps the only SRA commentator who had noticed its similarity to Dylan Thomas' "Under Milk Wood." I noticed that similarity too. I loved Under Milk Wood when I listened to a recording of it a few decades ago. So I wanted to know what else Swenson had to say about SRA.

I first became aware of Masters 40 years ago. Translations of about half of the poems that comprise SRA came out in Poland, where I lived, and I bought and read the little volume. I liked some of it enough to keep the book and eventually bring it with me to NY, where I've lived for the last 30 years. But it was only 4 months ago that I opened it again and reread the poems I'd marked all those years earlier as being to my liking. And then I decided to read the whole book in English and study its historical and cultural context.

Regardless of the merits of this edition or that, what is it about Masters that makes him interesting? Few people seem to know anything about him anymore. Some vaguely remember the words "Spoon River Anthology" just as most people remember the words "I have a dream" without knowing much about the person who said them.

I am not a poetry 'maven' and I am not an American. I write song lyrics for only one performer back home, which has changed so much that I don't really recognize it on my infrequent visits. I'm not sure I understand Americans even though I've lived here for decades - and not in some Polish ghetto. My life is an American life, and Masters was kind of similar to me. His life was very American. His consciousness was something else.

We take a lot at face value. We accept the language (and the frame of reference) the media impose on us. Masters wasn't like that. He fiercely rejected much of the rhetoric and mores of his time. He was more educated than most, and the education was the result of his own need to know, not of his pursuit of position (what he called "the wondrous cheese" in one poem).

Being individualistic or contrary is not what makes Masters so interesting; he was not unique in that. And I'm not saying he will give you all the perspective you'll need should you decide that today's rhetoric doesn't quite explain the world to you. But he will be one very alternative voice, one that helps understand how relative the meaning of certain words is. It can be enlightening to realize that words we hold dear and think we understand perfectly well weren't always defined as they are today, that they can be made to mean almost anything with enough repetition and amplification. For example, to Masters being democratic meant being against Lincoln - and not at all simply because Lincoln was what was then known as a Republican. Being a Democrat then meant being against the "strife" (Masters' word) Lincoln supposedly was in favor of - never mind that the strife just might make America more lower-case-d democractic (as in "of/by/for the people"). Incidentally, Masters didn't like John Brown either. He didn't think "Brown was the sort of man who should be celebrated." (NYT 02/15/1942).

'Liberal' in those days didn't mean 'socialistic.' As far as I can tell, back then liberal meant anti-Calvinist, opposed to vindictive religiosity with the political power to dictate how people should live, to outlaw drink and tobacco, make divorce shameful, and demand a horse be removed from public view lest 'public morals' be corrupted.

Masters was a pamphleteer as much as he was a poet - or more so. I think he was politically confused but I'm not looking for a prophet. I'm interested in alternative perspectives, and Masters will give you one. So, of course, could some other pamphleteers, whose politics might be easier to define. And herein lies an interesting paradox. Somebody like an Emma Goldman was many times clearer about how society works and how justice might prevail. Masters was 'for the people;' in his law practice he was often the advocate of labor. At the same time he was a typical 21st-century American liberal, who's for the people and justice - so long as there's no 'strife.' And yet, at least in Spoon River Anthology, Masters' half-baked ideas may well have been expressed with more passion, more eloquently, than in Emma Goldman's or Lucy Parson's far more mature writings. That's the power of poetry written with conviction, even if the conviction is misguided.

So was Masters a great poet? Most commentators seem to feel that SRA was the only one of his 50 books that represented a literary accomplishment. Let's say that's true. So what was it about SRA that made it so special? Three things, I think. (1) In the Anthology Masters is not speaking as himself. No matter how much of himself he put into most of these characters, he was speaking as them, which forced him to curb his preaching and lecturing urges. (2) When he was writing in conventional meters, he also stuck with conventional themes and accepted 'poetic' diction. ("Mr. Masters is seldom original when he writes in regular forms. It seems as though some obscure instinct of relation set his mind echoing with old tunes, old words, old pictures," wrote Amy Lowell). When his friend and publisher Reedy practically forced him to abandon that style, Masters was freed to explore other themes and real emotions of actual people he knew. (3) A commentator (from the Singapore Institute of Management, yet) may have explained this next aspect best. SRA is not a collection of epitaphs. It's a collection of utterances from people who are already dead, so they can 'tell it like it is' (or was). These are dramatic monologues, where two rules seem to dominate: candor and brevity, which, combined, can add up to considerable power. You can't not quote one poem in this context:

John M. Church

I WAS attorney for the "Q"
And the Indemnity Company which insured
The owners of the mine.
I pulled the wires with judge and jury,
And the upper courts, to beat the claims
Of the crippled, the widow and orphan,
And made a fortune thereat.
The bar association sang my praises
In a high-flown resolution.
And the floral tributes were many--
But the rats devoured my heart
And a snake made a nest in my skull!

Those two lines at the end, that two-fisted punch - in my book it doesn't get much better. And SRA has a lot of those punch lines. If you're ideological/partisan, they probably won't do much for you. If you respond to art based on its merit and not political labels associated with its creator, they may. You won't necessarily agree with Masters; he is dated. But he will get you to think and he'll do it with a power that you won't find in many other places.

So did the book 'meet my expectations'? Yes. I bought it for May Swenson's 10-page intro and I got that. The introduction had some insights and some errors. Hod Putt didn't lie side by side with his victim. That's a venial mistake. Saying 'veniality' when you mean 'venality' ("political swindling, graft, veniality, enforced poverty") is perhaps less so. Was Ida Chicken vain and silly, as Swenson suggests?

(...) the clerk of the district Court
Made me swear to support and defend
The constitution (...)
That very morning
The Federal Judge, in the very next room
To the room where I took the oath,
Decided the constitution
Exempted Rhodes from paying taxes
For the water works of Spoon River!

Everybody makes mistakes. A Study Guide to SRA published by a theater in Alabama says on page 4 that Masters died in 1953; meanwhile on page 2 there's a picture of his tombstone that clearly says 1950. The author of The Spoon River Metblog has written a really interesting "modern adaptation of Spoon River Anthology" and, much to his credit, apparently asked some real authorities for help in this undertaking - and then placed them in the wrong university. Minor stuff, forgivable sloppiness. Wrenn & Wrenn, true Masters scholars, describe Masters' phrase "fearless singers and livers" as an "unfortunate apparent reference to the internal organs" and a "synecdoche, common in Masters, for the free and hearty people of Virginia as opposed to New England Calvinists." No, it was not a synechdoche. "Liver(s)" is a key Masters term for those who know how to live, which he uses over and over, eg. "Oh livers and artists of Hellas centuries gone" (Thomas Trevelyan).

I've read a lot of Masters scholarship in the last 4 months, so to me Swenson was simply one of the voices. John Hallwas' essay in the University of Illinois Press edition of SRA was infinitely more enlightening. John Hollander in the introduction and Ronald Primeau in the afterword to the Signet edition of SRA also said more than Swenson. So I'm glad I've read her piece, but it wasn't the best writing on the subject. Masters and his vision of life - specifically as presented in SRA - is another matter altogether. Check the Anthology out. If you lend it a sympathetic ear, it will reward you richly. In spite of himself and his ideas about good poetry, Masters accidentally wrote a hit book when his friend and editor refused to print his pseudoclassical fluff and told him to "for God's sake, lay off."

The fact that Spoon River Anthology caused a furore and thus became a hit doesn't necessarily mean the poems were any good. The furore (or réclame, as Masters' contemporaries put it) has been described as a succès de scandale meaning that people were glued to the serialized Anthology not because it was great poetry but rather because of the juicy sexual tidbits or the dirty details in the descriptions of easily recognizable personalities. If that were all, we wouldn't be talking about the Anthology. Compared with today's standards, the sex and the corruption were puny, timid. Australian writer Margaret Rees has explained why we're still talking: "Masters seems like an old curmudgeon, but the voices swell together in a chorus evoking the despair and low key tragedy of the town. The songs echo plaintively in the memory for a long while."

Whose songs are these, exactly? Masters created Spoon River and its characters out of the situations and people he knew. But it was not a small Illinois community he set out to depict. As commentators have pointed out many times - repeating what Masters himself had said - Spoon River is a microcosm through which we are presented with the author's vision of how the world works. An unsigned New York Times review from 1915 (the year of the publication of the first, incomplete, version of the Anthology) explains why the village setting is particularly effective and well-suited to such an undertaking:

"The weakling or the criminal in a village community has no defenses, no subterfuges; every spring of his action is open to him who can analyze It. In the city the weak and the degenerate tend to segregate: the individual is lost in the class. In the small community the exact opposite obtains; the individual who falls below the community standard or departs from its regularity, stands out with uncompromising distinctness."

In other words, the microcosm provided Masters with the opportunity to draw very distinct portraits, and the constraints of the dramatic monologue made those portraits that much sharper. To reiterate one of my earlier points, the same review goes on to say:

"In the scheme of Mr. Masters's psychology, however, the novel point is that the subject confesses trom the immunity of the grave. The shades of Spoon River rehearse their crimes, sadden us with their little, sordid, futile lives, and now and again hearten us with their dreams and victories. They keep nothing back, not even the aspiration not bold enough to face a philistine world. They reply to each other from the grave, refuting accusations, gibing at hypocrisies, contrasting points of view with delightful humor, satire, and irony."

And that is probably why "[t]he songs echo plaintively in the memory for a long while" and why reading the Anthology is still so rewarding even if we agree with Babette Deutsch, who said in Poetry in Our Time, "However they differ in their attitudes and the circumstances of their lives, the characters are not identifiable by their speech. The cadences are monotonous and closer to prose than to song." So perhaps Spoon River is Masters' Song of Myself.
28 people found this helpful
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Paul S. Stone
5.0 out of 5 stars An American literary classic cloaked in beautiful leather.
Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2022
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A poet friend was working on a book focused on the echoes left by the deceased patrons of an ancient cemetery. I immediately thought of Spoon River Anthology when he explained his vision for this next book of his poems. Over the years I have purchased two or three copies of Spoon River, none of which could I find when I went in search. In searching Amazon I came across this beautiful leather-bound copy, and you can bet I will never lose or misplace it again.
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Donald I. Siegel
3.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly good
Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2017
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I have heard of the spoon river anthology for years and decided to try it out. The first half was splendid--a clear bittersweet account in verse of what life in small towns even today must be like. Insular in part but sometimes wonderful. Moving poems containing great truths. But there are many and the last third I found the writing tedious at times and purple if you get the sense. Read the first third and understand better the current division of American politics at a much deeper level. One learns the makeup of middle America small towns in beautiful blank verse.
7 people found this helpful
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Barbara Jung
5.0 out of 5 stars It's a book filled with poems/epitaphs about deceased people in Spoon River
Reviewed in the United States on October 3, 2022
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Beautifully written - very clever, funny, and moving poems.
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Dan C.
5.0 out of 5 stars Important to another century ...
Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2002
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Edgar Lee Masters was a Chicago attorney who, long before Lake Woebegone, wrote of the mythical village of Spoon River, IL. Specifically, of the real stories of the people in it's graveyard. Now that they're dead the truth can finally be told. And almost all of them lived lives of terrible lies. I was introduced to it in Jr. High, was blown away at the realization that people all around me probably had these same kinds of secrets, living with them hidden, or hoped they were hidden. Paraphrasing, "I was of the party of Prohibition (anti-alcohol), villagers thought I died from eating watermelon. It was my liver. Every day at noon I slipped behind the partition at the drug store and had a generous drink from the bottle labeled Spiritum Fermenti!" The several poems that introduce Hamilton Greene are as powerful as anything I've ever read. Do yourself a huge favor, read this book! And then imagine yourself in the Spoon River graveyard, finally able to tell the truth about your life.
13 people found this helpful
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Gianluca
5.0 out of 5 stars Un classico
Reviewed in Italy on November 30, 2017
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Fa sempre bene avere questo libro a portata di mano insieme agli altri ebook. Un capolavoro eterno in una nuova edizione più curata nella traduzione.
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Leslie Gardner
5.0 out of 5 stars classic that rewards
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 18, 2014
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repeated readings since high school - okay, as i get older it seems a bit facile but it's so familiar!
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nena
4.0 out of 5 stars Il senso della vita
Reviewed in Italy on May 16, 2014
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Sempre attuali le riflessioni, i sentimenti e le relazioni umane di tutti noi , nello scorrere della vita proprio come un fiume.

Letto da giovani ma rilletto piu' avanti negli anni cogli maggiormente i sui messaggi
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Cheery
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting collection giving and insight to times past.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 7, 2014
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Interesting collection giving and insight to times past.
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Karl-Johann Hemmersam [wieso ŽöffentlichenŽ Namen?]
1.0 out of 5 stars lost!!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 12, 2014
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This was awful - the book never came - and the procedure getting my small amount of money back didn't seem very clear to me, though it may be for a trained digitalist, but think a bit about 70+ also. In the end I most of all loathe that their was no effort, or offer, to try to get the book for me, after all really the only thing I wanted! I wonder if this just shows that small issues are easier to neglect (a bit), or if it mainly shows the problem of involving outside firms in the business. OK, I got the money in the end (28 days is a bit much to wait for posing a final complaint), and I have had no previous bad experience with the actual provider - that's also why I initially took that choice.
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