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21-425: 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

42-505: A Petersburg cemetery, and a tour of graveyards in both towns, especially Oak Hill Cemetery in Lewistown, reveals most of the surnames that Masters applied to his characters. After growing up and leaving Lewistown for Chicago, Masters met and befriended William Marion Reedy , the owner, publisher and editor of the St. Louis-based literary magazine Reedy's Mirror . By the time Masters wrote

63-455: A memorial statue of Masters and offers a self-guided walking tour of the graves that inspired the poems. In 2015, the town celebrated the 100th anniversary of the anthology's publication with tours, exhibitions, and theatrical performances. Today Spoon River Anthology often is assigned in high school and college literature classes and as a source of monologues for theatrical auditions. It is also often used in second-year characterization work in

84-499: 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. Many of the characters who make appearances in Spoon River Anthology were based on people that Masters knew or heard of in

105-514: The Greek Anthology , a collection of classical period epigrams , to which Spoon River Anthology is stylistically similar. Spoon River Anthology originally was published in serial form in Reedy's Mirror from May 29, 1914, until January 5, 1915. The poems were attributed initially to the pseudonym Webster Ford. William Marion Reedy , owner, publisher and editor of the magazine revealed

126-556: The Meisner technique of actor training. Spoon River Anthology is credited as an initial inspiration for the "audio log" storytelling device in video games as it first appeared in the game System Shock , a narrative technique that became a standard trope of narrative games. Petersburg, Illinois Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include

147-531: The Mirror in 1893. He became owner of the Mirror , where he published the work of up-and-coming poets like Sandburg, Teasdale and Masters. Reedy had an eye for talented new writers, often publishing writers before they gained widespread recognition. He published Edgar Lee Masters' poetry in 1914, work that later formed the Spoon River Anthology . The poet and editor, Orrick Johns, wrote in Time of Our Lives that "Reedy

168-419: The "exhaustion of body" that befell him while writing, which eventually manifested in pneumonia and a year-long bout of illness as the work was being prepared for publication. He claims that the Lewistown residents who strove to identify the poems' characters with real people did so only "with poor success". More recently, Lewistown celebrated its relationship to Masters's poetry. The Oak Hill Cemetery features

189-513: The Lewistown library board, voted for the ban. (Masters claimed "My mother disliked [the anthology]; my father adored it".) Despite this, the anthology remained widely read in Lewistown; local historian Kelvin Sampson notes that "Every family in Lewistown probably had a sheet of paper or a notebook hidden away with their copy of the Anthology, saying who was who in town". Masters capitalized on

210-596: The audience of his newspaper, Reedy's Mirror . Politically, Reedy was a liberal Democrat and advocated Georgist economics. Reedy was born in St. Louis in 1862. He spent his childhood in Kerry Patch and later attended St. Louis University . He began his career as a writer's assistant at the Missouri Republican . He then worked for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat before starting his acclaimed tenure at

231-402: The details below. Request from 172.68.168.237 via cp1104 cp1104, Varnish XID 213259345 Upstream caches: cp1104 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 07:59:01 GMT William Marion Reedy William Marion Reedy (1862 – July 28, 1920) was a St. Louis –based editor best known for his promotion of the poets Sara Teasdale , Edgar Lee Masters , and Carl Sandburg to

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252-485: 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 Paris Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag— All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on

273-472: The hill. Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily, And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton, And Major Walker who had talked With 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 Jones Who played with life all his ninety years, Braving

294-542: The old home valley where the writer came from. Such a writer and book are realized here." The book sold 80,000 copies over four years, making it an international bestseller by the standards of the day. Meanwhile, those who lived in the Spoon River region objected to their portrayal in the anthology, particularly as so many of the poems' characters were based on real people. The book was banned from Lewistown schools and libraries until 1974. Even Masters's mother, who sat on

315-447: The poems that became Spoon River Anthology, he had published some poetry with some success; these prior poems, however, were more conventional in style and subject matter. Masters later wrote that it was Reedy, through his criticism and friendship, who encouraged him to write "something more distinctive than what I was doing, somehow, someway, but without telling me how to do it." Masters in particular credited Reedy with introducing him to

336-567: The poems' true authorship in November 1914, after 21 weekly entries. The first bound edition of Spoon River Anthology was published by The Macmillan Company in 1915 with a total of 213 poems. Masters added 33 new poems in the 1916 edition, expanding on new characters with connections to some of the originals. Among these new additions were "Andy the Night-Watch", "Isa Nutter," "Plymouth Rock Joe" and "The Epilogue." Spoon River Anthology

357-491: 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 said One 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

378-413: 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

399-429: The success of Spoon River Anthology with the 1924 sequel The New Spoon River , in which Spoon River became a suburb of Chicago and its inhabitants have been urbanized. The second work was less successful and received poorer reviews. In 1933, Masters wrote a retrospective essay on the composition of Spoon River Anthology and the response it received, entitled "The Genesis of Spoon River". He recounts, among other things,

420-479: The two towns in which he grew up: Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois . Masters sometimes substantially disguised the names of these real-life inspirations, but he sometimes disguised them only barely and, in a few cases, not at all. Most notable is Anne Rutledge , regarded in local legend to be Abraham Lincoln 's early love interest (though there is no actual proof of such a relationship); Masters heard this legend from his grandfather. Rutledge's grave can be found in

441-420: Was a critical and commercial success. Ezra Pound 's review of the Spoon River poems begins: "At last! At last America has discovered a poet." Carl Sandburg 's review is similarly glowing: "Once in a while a man comes along who writes a book that has his own heart-beats in it. The people whose faces look out from the pages of the book are the people of life itself, each trait of them as plain or as mysterious as in

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