Imagine you are dead and have the chance to explain yourself to the living. You can have up to roughly two dozen lines of free verse to say it. This will be your epitaph, the final word on your life.
What would you say?
Spoon River Anthology is a collection of a couple hundred such epitaphs. Crafted by Edgar Lee Masters in the early 20th Century, it captures the life of a small town in the Midwest by allowing the dead to speak one last time. It’s a fictional town; well mostly—the book was long banned from use in the public schools in Masters’ hometown, because the locals all had copies in which they penciled in the real names of the fictional characters.
The copy I own is the 100th Anniversary Edition, with a back cover proclaiming “The freshness of this masterpiece undiminished, Spoon River Anthology remains a landmark of American literature.” Publisher’s hyperbole? Depends on how you measure such things. Individual poems are a staple in high school literature anthologies, so there is that. But, is it worth reading straight through 250 pages of fictional epitaphs?
A century ago, the book was all the rage. The idea of telling the story of a town through a long series of monologues is rather clever. Each entry tells a story. You now know that person. Ah, but turn the page and there is another story which contradicts the story you just read. It turns out husbands and wives or parents and children have very different ways of seeing the same thing. If nothing else, this book is a rather good way to force you to realize that the story you just imagined telling about your own life might, much to your shock, come out different than how you are mentioned in the stories of others.
Part of the sensation of this book when it was first published is irrecoverable. Take A. D. Blood:
If you in the village think that my work was a good one,
Who closed the saloons and stopped all playing at cards,
And haled old Daisy Fraser before Justice Arnett,
In many a crusade to purge the people of sin;
Why do you let the milliner’s daughter Dora,
And the worthless son of Benjamin Pantier
Nightly make my grave their unholy pillow?
Are you shocked? Now back up a hundred years and imagine the shock of a book that has a couple engaging in an illicit union on a grave. And the whole image is just tossed out there in the last line of a seven line poem. Living in the 21st century, you weren’t shocked. But, readers at the time of publication were…which presumably did not put a damper on sales.
A hundred years later, Blood’s epitaph illustrates the limitations of the book as a whole. That particular poem is noticeable; you read it, hit that last line, and you can’t help but notice. But, not every story can end with a killer line. Not every story can reveal that a previously told story may not have been entirely true. Most stories are stand-alone, the voice of an individual unlike the other individuals in the book. After reading a hundred such stories, are you eager to see the 101st? After 150, still going strong?
I mentioned this feature of the book to a friend of mine, who laughed at me and asked for which book of poetry this is not true. Which poet can I read poem after poem straight through for 30 or 60 minutes? Obviously, none. Then it dawned on me: this really is a book of poetry. I read the whole thing trying to force it into the genre of epic poem, telling a story. But, this isn’t The Odyssey or Paradise Lost. It is North of Boston or Lyrical Ballads. Sure some of the poems connect, but it really is just a series of poems.
As a book of poetry, is it good. Yes. Is it Great? Ah, that will hinge entirely on how often a poem causes your attention level to rise. It is hard to know how often that will happen for you.
An example: the poem which grabbed my attention and won’t let go is the story of Seth Compton:
When I died, the circulating library
Which I built up for Spoon River,
And managed for the good of inquiring minds,
Was sold at auction on the public square,
As if to destroy the last vestige
Of my memory and influence.
For those of you who could not see the virtue
Of knowing Volney’s “Ruins” as well as Butler’s “Analogy”
And “Faust” as well as “Evangeline,”
Were really the power in the village,
And often you asked me,
“What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?”
I am out of your way now, Spoon River,
Choose your own good and call it good.
For I could never make you see
That no one knows what is good
Who knows not what is evil;
And no one knows what is true
Who knows not what is false.
As even semi-regular readers of this here space will know, it is not hard to figure out why Seth Compton resonated so deeply with me. He died; mission unaccomplished. I guess if he had succeeded, I would not have a mission. Then again, he wasn’t real. But, if Seth Compton is right, and I obviously think he is, then many people won’t find this particular poem interesting at all.
Should you read this book? It is fun, easy to read, and has enough characters that surely you will find some appealing. I suspect, however, that the real reason to read this book straight through is that you can afterwards have it on your shelf where it will constantly provide something to do in an idle minute when you flip open the book at random and remember some of the denizens of Spoon River on the off chance that the person whose tale you are reading will give you some insight into your trials of the moment.
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