Characters include Tom Merritt, Amos Sibley, Carl Hamblin, Fiddler Jones and A.D. Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary's Grove,Įach of the following poems is an autobiographical epitaph of a dead citizen, delivered by the dead themselves. Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago, Who played with life all his ninety years,ĭrinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin, They brought them dead sons from the war, Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag-Īnd old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton, One after life in far-away London and Paris One of a broken pride, in the search for heart's desire
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?. Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith, One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife-Īll, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill. The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter? Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley, The first poem serves as an introduction: Louis, Missouri, literary journal Reedy's Mirror, under the pseudonym Webster Ford. The poems originally were published in 1914 in the St.
Many of the poems contain cross-references that create an unabashedly candid tapestry of the community. The collection includes 212 separate characters, in all providing 244 accounts of their lives, losses, and manner of death. The aim of the poems is to demystify rural and small town American life. Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free verse poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the Spoon River, which ran near Masters' home town of Lewistown, Illinois.
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