Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade—as if the last of days
Were fading, and all wars were done.
_Edgar Lee Masters_
Edgar Lee Masters was born at Garnett, Kansas, August 23, 1869, of
old Puritan and pioneering stock. When he was still a boy, the
family moved to Illinois, where, after desultory schooling, he
studied law in his father’s office at Lewiston. For a year he
practised with his father and then went to Chicago, where he became
a successful and prominent attorney.
Before going to Chicago, Masters had composed a great quantity of
verse in traditional forms on still more traditional themes; by the
time he was twenty-four he had written about four hundred poems,
revealing the result of wide reading and betraying the influence of
Poe, Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. His work, previous to the
publication of _Spoon River Anthology_, was derivative and
undistinguished. In 1895 he wrote a blank verse play on Benedict
Arnold. In 1898 he published _A Book of Verses_, a selection of some
sixty of the early four hundred. In 1902 _Maximilian_, another blank
verse play, appeared, causing no more comment than the others.
Nothing daunted, Masters published several volumes in rapid
succession (three books of poetry appearing, under various
pseudonyms, between 1905 and 1912), _The New Star Chamber and Other
Essays_ (1904), _Blood of the Prophets_ (1905), _Althea_, a play
(1907), _The Trifler_, another play (1908).
In 1914, Masters, at the suggestion of his friend William Marion
Reedy, turned from his preoccupation with classic subjects and began
to draw upon the life he knew for those concise records which have
made him famous. Taking as his model _The Greek Anthology_, which
Reedy had pressed upon him, Masters evolved _Spoon River Anthology_,
that astonishing assemblage of over two hundred self-inscribed
epitaphs, in which the dead of a middle Western town are supposed to
have written the truth about themselves. Through these frank
revelations, many of them interrelated, the village is recreated for
us; it lives again, unvarnished and typical, with all its intrigues,
hypocrisies, feuds, martyrdoms and occasional exaltations. The
crippling monotony of existence in a drab township, the defeat of
ideals, the struggle toward higher goals—all is synthesized in these
crowded pages. All moods and all manner of voices are heard
here—even Masters’s, who explains the reason for his medium and the
selection of his form through “Petit, the Poet.”
The success of the volume was stupendous. (See Preface.) With every
new attack (and its frankness continued to make fresh enemies) its
readers increased; it was imitated, parodied, reviled as “a piece of
yellow journalism;” hailed as “an American Comédie Humaine.”
Finally, after the storm of controversy, it has taken its place as a
landmark in American literature.
With _Spoon River Anthology_ Masters arrived—and left. He went back
to his first rhetorical style, resurrecting many of his earlier
trifles, reprinting dull echoes of Tennyson, imitations of Shelley,
archaic paraphrases in the manner of Swinburne. Yet, though none of
Masters’s subsequent volumes can be compared to his masterpiece, all
of them contain examples of the same straightforwardness, the
stubborn searching for truth that intensified his best known
characterizations.
_Songs and Satires_ (1916) contains the startling “All Life in a
Life” and the gravely moving “Silence.” _The Great Valley_ (1916) is
packed with echoes and a growing dependence on Browning. In _Toward
the Gulf_ (1918), the Browning influence predominates, although
there are such splendid individual monologues as “The World Saver,”
“St. Deseret” and “Front the Ages with a Smile.” _Starved Rock_
(1919) and _Domesday Book_ (1920) are, like all Masters’s later
books, queerly assembled mixtures of good, bad and derivative verse.
And yet, for all of this poet’s borrowings, in spite of his cynicism
and disillusion, Masters’s work is a continual searching for some
key to the mystery of truth, the mastery of life.