20 pages • 40 minutes read
Edgar Lee MastersGeorge Gray
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot (1915)
A kind of companion piece to the story of George Gray, Eliot’s Prufrock codified the anxieties of a middle-aged man apart, terrified of the implications of actually pursuing his dreams. Given their proximate composition dates, published within months of each other, the two poems suggest the Prufrock character is a type that Eliot and Masters’ restless generation found not only intriguing but representative as a cautionary figure: See the Prufrock, but don’t be the Prufrock.
“Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson (1862)
Masters doesn’t laugh much. His dissection of the residents of Spoon River is reminiscent of Poe (a poet Masters admired): heavy, gloomy, and forbidding. A kind of snarky variation on a poem in which the speaker addresses the reader from the grave, the Dickinson poem compares to Masters’ because of its self-deprecating levity and its use of subtle irony as a way to deflate the somber import of death. Dickinson’s jaunty rhythm, which mimics the steady gallop of a horse-drawn hearse, creates a comic effect that allows the speaker what Masters’ speaker is so denied: the sly wit of irony.
“When I Am Dead, My Dearest” by Christina Rossetti (1848)
Although it is not a poem in which the narrator speaks from the grave, this Rossetti poem projects the same premise: The speaker addresses their own death, commanding the reader to forget them when they die. An unintentional rejoinder to Masters’ mournful elegy of a life never lived, this sonnet allows the speaker to dispute the right of anyone who wanders past her tombstone to waste any emotion on her. Death is welcoming, absolute, and comforting. Unlike Masters’ elaborate regrets, Rossetti blithely says life, any life, is life enough. If you will, the poet advises those who pass her tombstone, remember me; if you will, don’t.
Further Literary Resources
“The Sources of the Spoon: Edgar Lee Masters and the Spoon River Anthology” by James Hurt (1980)
Still regarded as the best contemporary reading of Masters’ collection, the article argues Masters’ cycle of eulogies delivered by the actual dead people broke new ground in introducing the psychology of first-person monologues. In addition to Masters’ frank exploration of sex and his unsentimental perception of small-town life, Masters invokes an eerier sort of mysticism in which the dead address the reader directly and reveal first-person insights into their lives.
“Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology: Naturalism in the American Countryside” by Chet Martin (2022)
A genre study, this article explores how Masters’ deep reading of the British Romantics influenced his embrace of the American school of naturalism. In this, Masters celebrates rural life in language that is accessible and reader-friendly but cannot ignore the realities of the small-town rural life he grew up within. In this, Masters is both poet and scientist.
The Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis by Liesl Olson (2017)
Often forgotten given the immense importance of the Harlem Renaissance in New York some 10 years later, the literary movement in which Masters found his identity represents his generation’s most courageous (and controversial) investigations into the reality of the American Midwest, romanticized in Masters’ time as a bucolic rural paradise. In addition to helpful chapters that explore the movement through different genres, the volume’s Introduction helpfully outlines the tenets of the movement and its principal figures, including Masters.
Listen to Poem
Many readings of Masters’ short poem exist, many of which are amateur classroom projects or part of the numerous theatrical presentations inspired by Spoon River. This 2017 reading by poet, essayist, and University of Iowa professor Christopher Merrill keeps with the tone of Masters’ graveyard eulogy. The delivery is simple—a man addressing the camera full faced—and the undramatic inflections capture Masters’ careful recreation of conversation prose with its texture of long vowels and soft consonants. Professor Merrill takes advantage of the free verse constructions to linger over moments in unscripted pauses that reveal the weight of a man confronting a life he never bothered much to live.
