One reason why the new poetry achieved so sudden a success was its
freedom from the traditionally stilted “poetic diction.” Revolting
strongly against the assumption that poetry must have a vocabulary of
its own, the poets of the new era spoke in the oldest and most stirring
tongue; they used a language that was the language not of the poetasters
but of the people. In the tones of ordinary speech they rediscovered the
strength, the dignity, the divine core of the commonplace.
E. A. Robinson had already been employing the sharp epithet, the direct
and clarifying utterance which was to become part of our present
technique. As early as 1897, in _The Children of the Night_, Robinson
anticipated the brief characterizations and the etched outlines of
Masters’s _Spoon River Anthology_; he stressed the psychological element
with unerring artistry and sureness of touch. His sympathetic studies of
men whose lives were, from a worldly standpoint, failures were a sharp
reaction to the current high valuation on financial achievements,
ruthless efficiency and success at any cost. Ahead of his period, he had
to wait until 1916, when a public prepared for him by the awakened
interest in native poetry discovered _The Man Against the Sky_ (1916)
and the richness of Robinson at the same time.
Frost and Masters were the bright particular planets of 1915, although
the star of the latter has waned while the light of the former has grown
in magnitude. Yet Masters’s most famous book will rank as one of the
landmarks of American literature. In it, he has synthesized the small
towns of the mid-West with a background that is unmistakably local and
implications that are universal. This amazing volume, in its curiosity
and comprehensiveness, is a broad cross-section of whole communities.
Beneath its surface tales and dramas, its condensation of grocery store
gossip, _Spoon River Anthology_ is a great part of America in microcosm.
The success of the volume was sensational. It was actually one of the
season’s “best sellers”; in a few months, it went into edition after
edition. People forgot Masters’s revelation of the sordid cheats and
hypocrisies, his arraignment of dirty politics and dirtier chicanery, in
their interest at seeing their neighbors so pitilessly exposed. Yet had
Masters dwelt only on the drab disillusion of the village, had he (as he
was constantly in danger of doing) overemphasized the morbid and sensual
episodes, he would have left only a spectacular and poorly-balanced
work. But the book ascends to buoyant exaltation and ends on a plane of
victorious idealism. In its wide gamut, _Spoon River_, rising from its
narrow origins, reaches epical proportions. Indigenous to its roots, it
is stark, unflinching, unforgettable.