The Spoon River Anthology Analysis

Every story, poem, or anthology alike has a part of the author’s feelings or past between their lines, which dictates their origins. The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters is not anything different in that regard. Every piece of writing has it’s origins and those origins can be not only interesting, but change the way the reader views the writing. This paper will not only discuss the origins of the famous Anthology, but show Edgar Lee Masters’ personal side of the origins and how those instances influenced his writing of The Spoon River Anthology. Edgar Lee Masters was born on August 23, 1868 on a Kansas prairie and grew up in two small Illinois cities named Lewistown and Petersburg. “... Masters was firmly rooted in the Midwestern society he both praised and criticized in Spoon River Anthology” (“Edgar Lee Masters”). Due to financial problems, Masters couldn’t complete college but he studied law under his father. He was a lawyer in Chicago for 30 years. Within those years, he began to write poetry and

“Masters modeled the Anthology on a collection of ancient Greek short poems and sayings (called the) The Greek Anthology” (Costello). When writing the Anthology, Masters wrote himself in as many different names. “Masters wrote himself into the Spoon River Anthology not only as ‘Webster Ford,’ his pseudonym for the magazine publication of the Anthology, but in a number of other epitaphs as well” (Hurt). This shows his personal attribution to his works. James Hurt writes: “Masters himself repeatedly made clear that the composition of the Spoon River Anthology coincided with the most important psychological crisis in his life and that the epitaphs were both an expression of that crisis and a means of working through it … The characters in the Anthology were not the products of ordinary memory or nostalgia, but Masters' own ghosts, internalized images