Spoon River Anthology

Spoon River Anthology is a 1915 collection of poems written in free verse by Edgar Lee Masters, an American dramatist, lawyer, and poet. They provide a holistic inventory of the multitude of life narratives making up a fictional town called Spoon River, loosely based on a river that wound around Masters’s hometown, Lewistown, Illinois. Though some still speculate about Masters’s motive for writing Spoon River Anthology, historical and textual analysis has led to a general consensus that he wanted to make a small-town American life intelligible and relatable to a more general American audience. The anthology covers more than two hundred characters, and each poem represents the epitaph of its corresponding character. Writing in this retrospective mode, Masters elucidates a concise survey of his fictional population and their primary hopes, failures, and limiting conditions. The poems are also inter-referential, gradually illuminating a web of social connection that undergirds the town’s complex, cumulative identity.

Spoon River Anthology contains 246 epitaphs. Unlike the usual epitaph, which is composed before death by the subject or by the deceased individual’s close ones, the poems are written posthumously, as if the deceased people are suspended in an indefinite temporality, looking back on the events of their lives. The volume of references to other poems contained in the anthology suggests that the people of Spoon River were deeply entangled in each other’s lives, for better or for worse. These entanglements also create the gradual impression that each member of the town subscribed to a local and incomplete version of reality. The value of the anthology itself is therefore that Masters’s audience can make out these narrative insufficiencies from an external point of view, and suspend judgment about the correctness of any single person’s narrative. It also shows how points of view are strongly informed by emotion and experience rather than objective fact.

Masters’s first poem is “The Hill,” in which the speaker is the cemetery where all of the former residents of Spoon River are buried. Despite its position as the site of their bodies, the cemetery seems confused about where each of its villagers is, rejecting the religious notion that they have gone on to some communal heaven. Instead, the cemetery successively resolves each of its questions with the assertion that “all are sleeping on the hill.” The cemetery is ambivalent about this form of sleep, refusing to make claims about sleep’s emotional or intellectual life. Rather, it suggests that this sleep consists of an extension, for each citizen, of the emotional profile of their lived experience.



Two of the anthology’s most well-known epitaphs are spoken by a husband and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Painter. Obviously self-centered, Mr. Painter describes his marriage as exploited by Mrs. Painter, who made him live in the back of their house and failed to provide a warm domestic life. His stubborn-sounding account implies that he is controlling the narrative or withholding acknowledgment of his wife’s perspective. In Mrs. Painter’s epitaph, she describes Mr. Painter as a mentally unstable alcoholic who managed to present as good-natured and highly competent in public. A further epitaph from a pharmacist named Trainor suggests that both Mr. and Mrs. Painter were individually good, but repelled and degraded each other, implying that they never should have gotten married.

In another poem, a marginalized Jew, Barney Hainsfeather, looks back on the town’s rejection of him and his clothing store. He perished in a train crash that made it impossible to identify his body. He laments that the town erroneously buried him in Spoon River’s Protestant cemetery, mixing him up with another victim, the Protestant John Allen, who was sent to Chicago’s Hebrew Cemetery.

Spoon River Anthology’s most well-known epitaph is that of Anne Rutledge, Abraham Lincoln’s former lover (he later married Mary Todd). Rutledge recalls being inspired primarily by Lincoln’s love, which engendered her interest in the American ideals he advocated. She believes that her and Lincoln’s mutual love catalyzed, in a spiritual way, the massive reconciliation that reintegrated the North and South after the Civil War. She, therefore, credits love above politics or rationality as America’s central unifying force. She concludes her epitaph exclaiming that her separation from Lincoln, in a paradoxical way, helped eventuate America’s spiritual unification. She is one of only a handful of characters that expresses no regret at the way she lived her life. Masters’s characters reveal trepidation about the moral quality of politicians, often representing Lincoln as the exception to the archetypal politician who is driven by personal, rather than moral, imperatives.



Spoon River Anthology is a rich profile of a single, small, tightly-knit American town, but its stories and guiding ideals relate to the conditions affecting the psyche of America and its literary legacy, even in a contemporary context. The cumulative effect of Masters’ writing is an exhortation to constantly examine the quality and ultimate purpose of one’s lived experience, and heed the messages sent or implied by our predecessors.