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Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950) |
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American poet and novelist, best-known as the author of Spoon River Anthology (1915), a series of 'auto-epitaphs' or monologues in free verse, which often contradicted the pious and optimistic epitaphs written on the gravestones. The book gained Edgar Lee Masters a large following and set him in the vanguard of the Chicago literary renaissance. Life all around me here in the village: Edgar Lee Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas, the son of Hardin
Masters, alawyer, and Emma Dexter Masters, but he grew up in the Illinois towns
of Petersburg, on the Sangamon River, and Lewistown, near Spoon river.
For a period his family lived with Hardin's parents, and then went on
to live in Petersburg in a series of houses, mostly small, cold, and
unhealthy. The farm of Masters' grandfather was surrounded by
streams, and later Masters blaimed
the Sangamon River and its unhealthy climate for the loss of his
brother Alex, who died of diphtheria at the age of five. Lewistown and
Petersburg became models for the scene of his poems in Spoon River. Hardin Masters was a "rollicking man," who loved playing poker and drink with moderation. He did not encourage his son's
literary aspirations, refusing to support studies in this field, but when
he died Masters said: "If before coming into the world I could have
chosen my father, and chosen him with all the understanding that I have
today, he is the man I should have chosen for my father." (Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography by Herbert K. Russell, 2001, p. 238) Allegedly Jefferson Howard was modeled in Spoon River
on Hardin: "I, full of spirit, audacity, courage/ Thrown into life here
in Spoon River,/ With its dominant forces drawn from/ New England,
Republicans, Calvinists, merchants, bankers,/ Hating me, yet fearing my
arm." Masters attended Knox College, known for its conservatism, and in 1891 he was admitted to the bar. After practicing law with his father for a year, he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a lawyer for nearly thirty years. As a result of a boyhood case of pneumonia, Masters had always been weak in the lungs, and in 1915 he contracted pneumonia through overwork. His legal clients started to decrease partly because his revealing poems about bigotry and liaisons in Spoon River stirred controversy. During the years in Chicago Masters married and began writing verse pseudonymously for newspapers. His first wife, Helen M. Jenkins, was the daughter of a Chicago lawyer. After resigning from Clarence Darrow's law firm Masters established his own law firm, remaining an attorney until 1920. Masters claimed that Darrow never paid him his share of the famous Haywood Case, a murder trial in 1907. "Big Bill" Haywood was a radical union activist, who was charged with the plotting of the murder of a former Idaho governor. The juryacquitted him. While in jail, Haywood read Dostoyevsky. Noteworthy, in his autobiography, Across Spoon River (1939) Masters never mentions Darrow, who represented his wife during the writer’s divorce. As a poet Masters made his debut already in 1898 with A Book of Verses. It was followed by Maximilian (1902), a drama in blank verse, The New Star Chamber (1904), a collection of essays, Blood of the Prophets (1905), and two plays, Althea (1907) and The Broad of Idleness (1911). His friends included Harriet Monroe, editor of the Poetry magazine, Carl Sandburg, whom he came to regard as a literary rival, Vachel Lindsay, and other member of the so-called Chicago Group. This circle meant much to Masters, whose literary achievements had been scorned in Lewistown. In 1909 Masters was introduced to Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, given him by Marion Reedy, editor
of Reedy's Mirror of St. Louis. This inspired Masters' most famous work, Spoon River Anthology,
a collection of realistic and sometimes cynical epitaphs spoken by
about 250 persons buried in the graveyard of a village in the Middle
West. "You will die, nodoubt, but die while living / In depths of
azure, rapt and mated, / Kissing the queen-bee, Life!" Original idea
for the book came from his mother, Emma Dexter, the daughter of a New
England Methodist minister, with whom he discussed people they used to
know in the villages. The work first appeared under the pseudonym of
Webster Ford in Reedy's Mirror in 1914 and 1915, and was then published in
book form, which sold, supposedly, 80,000 copies in its first year.
Masters based his poems on childhood memories of Petersburg and
Lewistown. A noteworthy exception among the graveyard
monologues is the poem 'Theodor the Poet,' about Masters' friend Theodore Dreiser. Masters's paternal grandmother, Lucinda Masters, appears as "Lucinda Matlock." A sequel, The New
Spoon River, came out in 1924, but it was less successful. Spoon River was
Masters' unflincing revenge on small-town hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness. It
gained a huge popularity, but shattered his position as a respectable
member of establishment: everybody realized that Masters' small town was a symbol of the nation iself. Before the appearance of his most famous work, Masters had a serious extramarital affair with the artist Tennessee Mitchell, who married the novelist Sherwood Anderson in 1916. Tennessee, the "Deidre" of his autobiography, had a distinctive nose and a prominent smile. The relationship lasted from 1909 to 1911. When his wife did not grant him a divorce, Masters left his family and sailed in 1921 to Europe. While in Paris, he met the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, dined with her, went to the Folies Bergere, and had according to his diary an "amorous interlude." In Vatican he had an audience with the pope and he visited the graves of Keats and Shelley. The
height of the Chicago renaissance was passed, and Masters considered
impossible to return back to his home town. He moved to New York, and
after the divorce was settled, Masters remarried in 1926. His wife,
Ellen Coyne Masters, was much younger; her father was an immigrant from
Ireland, who had joined the U.S. Cavalry and patrolled Wyoming and
Montana in the 1880's. Before marrying Ellen, Masters had an affair
with a thirty-eight-year-old amateur poet, whom he called in his
autobiography "Idothea." She was thin, had a prominent nose
and suffered from a mysterious lower-back pain. Ellen
Masters pursued her own career as a teacher while her husband retired in spring 1930
to the Chelsea Hotel to write. The colorful hotel on 222 West
Twenty-third Street has also attracted such writers as Mark Twain, O.
Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Arthur C. Clarke,
William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. Masters' income from
lectures, articles, and the sales of books, etc was inadequate.
Moreover, he was not able to live on the royalties, which he received
from Spoon River – these covered only half of the cost of his lodging. (Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography by Herbert K. Russell, 2001, p. 297) Somehow
he still managed to live at the Chelsea twelve years until he had to
move out. In 'The Hotel Chelsea' he wrote: "Imprisoned in this dark
hotel/ Like a
lone spider in a well/ I am caught as in a spell/ Seemingly forever . .
. " (New York Hotel Experience: Cultural and Societal Impacts of an American Invention by Annabella Fick, 2017, p. 180)
Although Masters'
writings were out of favour, he was appreciated by such diverse
writers as August Derleth and James T. Farrell, who visited him
in his two-room suite, and he corresponded with Mencken and
Dreiser. Besides poems Masters published biographies of Vachel Lindsay, who was his friend and fellow poet, Mark Twain, whom he depicted a frustrated genius, and Walt Whitman. His sharply critical study of the Civil War president Abraham Lincoln (1931), an attempt to destroy the "Lincoln myth," was the only one of his later books to gain a wider attention. In a different way, my father's serene presence in his metal chair rocked and bobbed in my mother's consciousness as he smoked and read every day, all day, by the window, passing into reverie of words s my grandfather had withdrawn into a Valhalla of memories. Sometimes, I would see him read one of his own poems or pieces of prose over and over, as if to discover how they had been written. (Last Stands: Notes from Memory by Hilary Masters, McGraw-Hill, 1982, p. 196) Though Masters continued to publish volumes of verse almost yearly,
the quality of his work never reached the level of his masterpiece. In
1943, overtaken by pneumonia and malnutrition, he returned to his wife
Ellen, who took care of him. For the last years of his life, Masters
was in poor heath. Reportedly the actor Peter Lorre wanted to assist
the author by purchasing the movie rights to Spoon River.
Also Bertolt Brecht expressed in the 1940s interest in bringing the
work to the screen. Ferdinand Reyher, a novelist, playwright and
Hollywood screenwriter, who knew the author, set up a meeting to
discuss the project, which never realized. Masters died in a
Philadelphia nursing home on March 5, 1950. He left nothing of value
except his copyright to Spoon River
and his papers. Hardin Wallace Masters' biography, Edgar Lee Masters: A Biographical Sketchbook About a Famous American Author (1978), accuses his father of indifference to the problems of his mother's family, the Jenkinses. "Each book since Spoon River engendered a new urge to get on, to create another masterpiece." (p. 152) Masters' son from his second marriage, Hilary Masters,
published in 1982 a portrait of his father under the title Last Stands. Five poems of Spoon River are included in the Norton Anthology of American Literature (ninth edition, 2017). For further reading: Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy (2021); Inside the Dream Palace: the Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel by Sherill Tippins (2013); 'Edgar Lee Masters' by Matthew J. Caballero, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Volume 3, edited by Jay Parini (2004); Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography by Herbert K. Russell (2001); Last Stands: Notes from Memory by Hilary Masters (1982); Beyond Spoon River: The Legacy of Edgar Lee Masters by Ronald Primeau (1981); Edgar Lee Masters by John H. Wrenn, Margaret Wrenn (1983); Edgar Lee Masters: A Biographical Sketchbook About a Famous American Author by Hardin Wallace Masters (1978); Edgar Lee Masters: The Spoon River Poet and His Critics by John Theodore Flanagan (1974) Selected works:
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