Edgar Lee Masters wrote the Spoon River Anthology as an homage to his boyhood home of Petersburg, Illinois and all the types of people he encountered there ("Genesis"). Published in 1915, the free-verse poetry collection works to disclose the inner workings of small-town life.
Towns are significant for showing to the reader the immense power of time and its passing. In positing each of the stories from the point of view of someone who is passed we understand Spoon River as a place that has been lived in. In a town, one passes through ever stage of life; seasons mark the months, the years. It is a place where living is let to take course, despite every measure to deny it that ability.
Again, time is important to the stories of those in Spoon River, for they all have succumb to its omnipresent grip. Lyman King, a character from the collection puts it as such:
In time you shall see Fate approach you
In the shape of your own image in the mirror;
Or you shall sit alone by your own hearth,
And suddenly the chair by you shall hold a guest,
And you shall know that guest,
And read the authentic message of his eyes. (Spoon River)
Death is inescapable in the town, however as Lyman points out, "You may think, passer-by, that Fate / Is a pit-fall outside of yourself, / Around which you may walk by the use of foresight / And wisdom" (Spoon River). It is this false permenency that towns are built on, that social situations and construction will continue to be, unchallenged and unfettered. However culture is forever muteable.
Freed from the shackles of living, of being tied to the sickness of denial that sweeps so readily over towns, the townspeople of Spoon River can talk more freely, and the stories the dead have to tell tell something much differently from the common perception of the humble townsfolk. Women lament extramarital affairs and confess to their lost sons, despite them not being able to hear. One can now confess, under the cloak of purgatory-like isolation, what one would hide in life. And this is where towns fail: they silence and hide what need be heard or seen. Social situations become pantomimes, little plays which try to convince others of their effectiveness to conform.
Master writes of how he came to write the Anthology: "I may say that if I had any conscious purpose in writing it and the New Spoon River it was to awaken American vision, that love of liberty which the best men of the Republic strove to win for us, and to bequeath to time" ("Genesis" 55). So to peel back the layers of illusions which cloud the town is maintain the great elements of towns, those elements which should stand for all time, of which form a sort of core American principle.
Works Cited
Masters, Edgar Lee. "The Genesis of Spoon River." The American Mercury January (1933): pp. 38-55. Print. <http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1933jan-00038>.
—. Spoon River Anthology. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916; Bartleby.com, 1999. <www.bartleby.com/84/>. 3 May 2014.
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