I come from a family line of insurance businessmen dating back to the 1860’s. It was a considerable disappointment to my father when my brother and I decided to go into music and academia. We assumed that we couldn’t concentrate on the arts and sell insurance at the same time. But there have been people in the legal or insurance trade who have had remarkable creative careers.
The great American composer, Charles Ives, invented estate planning insurance programs still in use today. Way back when, John Donne (1571-1631) was a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn in London while writing poetry. More recently, poet Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive in Hartford, and Archibald MacLeish, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, practiced law in Boston. Which brings us to the poet featured in today’s column, Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950), who was a significant enough lawyer in Chicago that he entered into a partnership with the legendary Clarence Darrow. And still he managed to publish six novels, six biographies, twelve plays and twenty-one books of poetry. Case closed!
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Masters was a son of the Midwest, born in Kansas and raised in rural Illinois not far from the real Spoon River. Through his poetry, he became part of what has become known as the Chicago Literary Renaissance, writers from small towns who decried the loss of traditional values; a list including Theodore Dreiser (Indiana), Carl Sandburg (Illinois) and Sherwood Anderson (Ohio).
A few of Masters’ early poems were published under a pseudonym, but it wasn’t until he encountered epitaphs in a Greek Anthology that he was inspired to create the poetic monologues that became the Spoon River Anthology. The concept was that persons buried in a Lewistown, Illinois, cemetery, locally called the Hill, could speak to us from their graves and share their thoughts and experiences. In a thinly-veiled disguise, he renamed Lewistown as an imaginary village called Spoon River, and he populated the cemetery with a broad range of deceased speakers who were “sleeping on the Hill.”
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The very first epitaph he wrote was called “Hod Putt,” which perhaps suggests wordplay on the colloquialism “hard put.”
Here I lie close to the grave
Of Old Bill Piersol,
Who grew rich trading with the Indians, and who
Afterwards took the Bankrupt Law
And emerged from it richer than ever
Myself grown tired of toil and poverty
And beholding how Old Bill and others grew in wealth
Robbed a traveler one Night near Proctor’s Grove,
Killing him unwittingly while doing so,
For which I was tried and hanged.
That was my way of going into bankruptcy.
Now we who took the bankrupt law in our respective ways
Sleep peacefully side by side.
Already we see that Masters was prepared to embrace sordid subjects as well as enlightening ones, and his fictitious characters do often abound in scandal, innuendo, failed dreams and disappointment. Just as in real life. Here is a second epitaph, called “Chase Henry.”
In life I was the town drunkard;
When I died the priest denied me burial
In holy ground.
The which redounded to my good fortune.
For the Protestants bought this lot,
And buried my body here,
Close to the grave of the banker Nicholas,
And of his wife Priscilla.
Take note, ye prudent and pious souls,
Of the cross-currents in life
Which bring honor to the dead, who lived in shame.
To which, another cemetery occupant, “Judge Somers,”an ardent student of the law, made this response:
How does it happen, tell me,
That I who was the most erudite of lawyers,
Who knew Blackstone and Coke
Almost by heart, who made the greatest speech
The court-house ever heard, and wrote
A brief that won the praise of Justice Breese–
How does it happen, tell me,
That I lie here unmarked, forgotten,
While Chase Henry, the town drunkard,
Has a marble block, topped by an urn,
Wherein Nature, in a mood ironical,
Has sown a flowering seed?
Ultimately, Spoon River Anthology comprised 245 epitaphs from the graveyard on the Hill.
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Masters’ masterpiece (I couldn’t resist) is written in what is called Free Verse, which is to say, poetry that doesn’t employ any rhyme schemes or metrical patterns and is free of formal constraints. Using the name “Petit the Poet,” Masters looked back on his own early and frankly mediocre poems and looks ahead to a grander vision.
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel—
Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens—
But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?
Life all around me here in the village:
Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
Courage, constancy, heroism, failure—
All in the loom, and oh what patterns!
Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers—
Blind to all of it all my life long.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,
While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?
Indeed, some of these postmortem portraits are clearly autobiographical, and for those of us who came from small towns or rural settings, the remembrance of childhood and teenage years can be very moving. In this pastoral poem, one of the finest in American literature, Masters recalls idyllic days, slightly changing the name of his childhood friend, Henry Hummer, into “Hare Drummer.” Siever’s farm had a favored orchard.
Do the boys and girls still go to Siever’s
For cider, after school, in late September?
Or gather hazel nuts among the thickets
On Aaron Hatfield’s farm when the frosts begin?
For many times with the laughing girls and boys
Played I along the road and over the hills
When the sun was low and the air was cool,
Stopping to club the walnut tree
Standing leafless against a flaming west.
Now, the smell of the autumn smoke,
And the dropping acorns,
And the echoes about the vales
Bring dreams of life.
They hover over me.
They question me:
Where are those laughing comrades?
How many are with me, how many
In the old orchards along the way to Siever’s,
And in the woods that overlook
The quiet water?
Lucinda Matlock was the name Masters gave to his grandmother, whom he adored and thought of as a pioneer. (See video link below.) His tribute to his grandfather. here called “Aaron Hatfield,” forms a kind of climax to the Anthology and a remembrance of the plowmen and hewers of wood who were forming our country.
Better than granite, Spoon River,
Is the memory-picture you keep of me
Standing before the pioneer men and women
There at Concord Church on Communion day.
Speaking in broken voice of the peasant youth
Of Galilee who went to the city
And was killed by bankers and lawyers;
My voice mingling with the June wind
That blew over wheat fields from Atterbury;
While the white stones in the burying ground
Around the Church shimmered in the summer sun.
And there, though my own memories
Were too great to bear, were you, O pioneers,
With bowed heads breathing forth your sorrow
For the sons killed in battle and the daughters
And little children who vanished in life’s morning,
Or at the intolerable hour of noon.
But in those moments of tragic silence,
When the wine and bread were passed,
Came the reconciliation for us—
Us the ploughmen and the hewers of wood,
Us the peasants, brothers of the peasant of Galilee—
To us came the Comforter
And the consolation of tongues of flame!
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When the completed Spoon River Anthology was published in 1915, it was an international literary and commercial success. One prominent English critic declared Masters to be “the natural child of Walt Whitman.” However, back home in Lewistown, Illinois, there was little enthusiasm. Masters had sometimes used the names of real people for his most critical portraits, and even the fictitious names were often easy to decipher. Because of the personal history of the individuals depicted and their relationship to the town, the book was banned from the local schools and library, and the ban not lifted for sixty years. Today, where emotions were once raw, celebrations of Edgar Lee Masters and Spoon River are year-round events, and there are frequent tours of the cemetery whose inhabitants are still quietly Sleeping on the Hill.
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VIDEO: William Shatner joins Cynthia Herman, Jill Tanner and George Backman in the presentation of the Spoon River Introduction and six of the best-known portraits: Lucinda Matlock, Fiddler Jones, Roscoe Purkapile, Mrs. Purkapile, Deacon Taylor and Anne Rutledge. We close with Edgar Lee Masters’ own epitaph.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY
