Edgar Lee Masters and Lewistown

Lewistown, Home of Edgar Lee Masters

For those who don't know or can't remember from high school English, Edgar Lee Masters wrote a book of free verse called Spoon River Anthology, written as first-person epitaphs.  Published in 1915, it's never been out of print.

sign outside the cemetery the book was based on

His invented town of Spoon River (named after the nearby river), is a working-class town, just as Lewistown is.  One of the things that made Masters controversial, nationally as well as locally, is that these poems refuse to idealize small-town America, as was customary at that time.  Instead, though many characters are good and optimistic, many others are corrupt, hypocritical, and deceitful.

Which brings up one of the other reasons Masters was locally controversial: he often used real people, both living and dead, as the basis for the characters in these poems.  Masters himself said 66 of the characters were buried in the town's cemetery, though only 41 have so far been identified. 

A century after the fact, with those most concerned now dead, the town has come to terms with the book.  People (like me) come from all over the world to see this town, which now offers a walking tour of the cemetery showing where the subjects of the poems are buried, and the identities of the real people that inspired them.

The following has always been my favorite and is a good example of one of the optimistic epitaphs.

Lucinda Matlock, by Edgar Lee Masters

I went to the dances at Chandlerville,

And played snap-out at Winchester.

One time we changed partners,

Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,

And then I found Davis.

We were married and lived together for seventy years, 

Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children, 

Eight of whom we lost

Ere I had reached the age of sixty.

I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,

I made the garden, and for holiday

Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,

And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,

And many a flower and medicinal weed —

Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.

At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,

And passed to a sweet repose.

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

Degenerate sons and daughters,

Life is too strong for you —

It takes life to love Life.

Masters couldn't figure out what made his novel such a popular sensation and spent much of his life unsuccessfully trying to replicate it. 

He's known by Lincoln scholars for the very unflattering biography of Lincoln that he wrote.  His position was that the "Lincoln myth" needed to be debunked.  Maybe so, but he and his family were strong supporters of the Democratic party and the views of Stephen Douglas, Lincoln's rival for the presidency, so it's reasonable to wonder how much of his personal opinions were injected in the biography.
 
Masters was especially irritated that Carl Sandburg, his contemporary, wrote a glowing, and glowingly received, biography of Lincoln, a fact that might also have influenced the tone of his writing.  But whatever his motivation, scholars recognize that his point of view is considered important for a well-rounded view of Lincoln.

I drove through the cemetery, but even new cemeteries aren't much designed for large vehicles like my RV, and this was absolutely not a new cemetery, though the headstones made it clear it's still being used. 

I also wanted very much to find a place where I could see Spoon River itself, but ran up against the problem that the only river crossings I could find in the area seemed to have almost no place to even pull off the road, let alone turn around, so I reluctantly gave up the idea.

Despite not getting around the area much, I'm still glad I went.  I'm glad to see that this small town has apparently decided that its native son brought them immortality, rather than notoriety, and are now willing to celebrate his talent.