playbill vip

Our play would not exist were it not for the genius of the poet Edgar Lee Masters. 

   Born in Garnett, Kansas in 1868, Masters’ early years were difficult ones. His family struggled financially as his father’s law practice floundered and they were forced to move several times, finally settling in Lewistown, Illinois in 1880. Here, a young Masters attended high school and had his first poems and articles published in local papers including the Chicago Daily News. Masters wanted to pursue a literary career but was discouraged by his parents, who instead steered Edgar into a career in the law.

       After being admitted to the Illinois bar, Masters moved to Chicago and established a law partnership with Clarence Darrow (of Scopes “monkey” trial fame). The two men worked together until 1911 when Masters left to start his own firm. However, his interest in writing—and in poetry in particular— never waned. He published a great many plays, poems and essays while working as an attorney, but tended to write under pseudonyms, wary of damaging his legal career. Then, in 1914, at the suggestion of his friend and publisher William Marion Reedy, Masters began work on a series of poems based on his childhood in Illinois. He wandered through Oak Hill Cemetery, gathering names off tombstones, remembering the people he had known in his youth, and crafting poems based on their exploits.

      Masters combined various poetic forms, mixing classical techniques with experimental ones to create an anthology wherein the dead return to recite their epitaphs in free verse. Some of these poems were first published as stand-alone works in the St. Louis-based literary magazine Reedy’s Mirror. Then, in 1915, all 212 original poems were assembled into a single volume and prepared for publication. Masters named his collection after the river that meandered through Lewistown, on whose banks he had so often played as a child, and Spoon River Anthology was born. Literary fashion of the late 19 th century often presented small town life as idyllic and wholesome. Small towns, it was supposed, were bastions of “real” American values. Masters begged to differ. His ghostly subjects were adulterers, thieves, liars. They died of botched abortions, suicide, alcoholism. The frankness with which Masters wrote about even the most taboo of topics of the age made his poetry scandalous, and wildly popular.

      Spoon River proved both a commercial and critical success, garnering praise from the likes of Ezra Pound who famously said of Masters, “At last America has discovered a poet.” But back in Illinois, the residents of Lewistown were not pleased. They recognized themselves and their loved ones in Masters’ poetry and resented having the carefully crafted façade over their bucolic community torn down. The citizenry was so perturbed, in fact, that Spoon River Anthology was banned in Lewistown schools and libraries until 1974! In recent years, however, Lewistown has come to accept and even celebrate its notoriety. Today, a memorial statue of Edgar Lee Masters graces his grave in Oak Hill Cemetery and, perhaps unsurprisingly, his stone bears an epitaph that the poet himself composed. It reads:

“Good friends, let’s to the fields…

After a little walk, and by your pardon,
I think I’ll sleep. There is no sweeter thing,
Nor fate more blessed than to sleep.
I am a dream out of a blessed sleep –
Let’s walk and hear the lark.”