Spoon River Anthology
Every now and then you come across a work of fiction that is both humorous and thought provoking. Recently, I listened to The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. For those unfamiliar with his volume, it is an anthology of poetry. Each poem is about a person buried in the graveyard at Spoon River, IL. Masters tells a little bit of that person’s story through their own voice. The overall connection of the poems, however, tells the story of the town.
Not all the people Masters wrote about had died, but he lampooned (maybe harpooned in a better word) them in this work. It caused much controversy in the time it was published. Some of the Spoon Riverians didn’t care for it at all because he actually used the names and stories of real people.
For the most part, this work drags on a little too long. It is nice to get a story from multiple angles, but there are only so many times that you can hear about the bank getting broken by the greedy owners, and about the various sins of different community leaders before things start to feel redundant. The anthology does this. The idea was novel for its time and still remains so. To give voices to the dead of a cemetery is a great way to get ideas for stories, but moderation is in order.
The overall connection in the poems tell the story of little town of Spoon Rive with all its warts and herpes sores showing. The town seems idyllic like many small towns, but just the same looks and the truth aren’t the same. Greed, politics, liquor, and sex permeate the small town. Most all the poems deal with one of these, even the reverends and priest are guilty as much as the crooks and drunkards.
The town of Spoon River is a disease. It infects all the narrators and brings all of them low. Masters did his job well. The town is a horrible creature and monster in its own right. However, the anthology takes too long to get through, and too many of the ghosts have the same story to tell.
