Spoon River Anthology

Spoon River Anthology is a 1915 collection of short free verse poems by Edgar Lee Masters. The poems collectively narrate the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the Spoon River, which ran near Masters's home town of Lewistown, Illinois. The aim of the poems is to demystify rural and small town American life. The collection includes 212 separate characters, in all providing 244 accounts of their lives, losses, and manners of death. Many of the poems contain cross-references that create a candid tapestry of the community. The poems originally were published in 1914 in the St. Louis, Missouri, literary journal Reedy's Mirror, under the pseudonym Webster Ford.

The first poem serves as an introduction:

"The Hill"Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?All, all are sleeping on the hill.One passed in a fever,One was burned in a mine,One was killed in a brawl,One died in a jail,One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife—All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?—All, all are sleeping on the hill.One died in shameful child-birth,One of a thwarted love,One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,One of a broken pride, in the search for heart's desire;One after life in far-away London and ParisWas brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag—All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,And Major Walker who had talkedWith venerable men of the revolution?—All, all are sleeping on the hill.They brought them dead sons from the war,And daughters whom life had crushed,And their children fatherless, crying—All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.Where is Old Fiddler JonesWho played with life all his ninety years,Braving the sleet with bared breast,Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary's Grove,Of what Abe Lincoln saidOne time at Springfield.

Each of the following poems is an autobiographical epitaph of a dead citizen, delivered by the dead themselves. Characters include Tom Merritt, Amos Sibley, Carl Hamblin, Fiddler Jones and A.D. Blood. They speak about the sorts of things one might expect: Some recite their histories and turning points, others make observations of life from the outside, and petty ones complain of the treatment of their graves, while few tell how they really died. The subject of afterlife receives only the occasional brief mention, and even those seem to be contradictory. Speaking without reason to lie or fear the consequences, they construct a picture of life in their town that is shorn of façades. The interplay of various villagers—such as a bright and successful man crediting his parents for all he's accomplished, and an old woman weeping because he is secretly her illegitimate child—forms a gripping, if not pretty, whole.