These entanglements also create the gradual impression that each member of the town subscribed to a local and incomplete version of reality. The volume of references to other poems contained in the anthology suggests that the people of Spoon River were deeply entangled in each other’s lives, for better or for worse. Unlike the usual epitaph, which is composed before death by the subject or by the deceased individual’s close ones, the poems are written posthumously, as if the deceased people are suspended in an indefinite temporality, looking back on the events of their lives. Spoon River Anthology contains 246 epitaphs. The poems are also inter-referential, gradually illuminating a web of social connection that undergirds the town’s complex, cumulative identity. Writing in this retrospective mode, Masters elucidates a concise survey of his fictional population and their primary hopes, failures, and limiting conditions. The anthology covers more than two hundred characters, and each poem represents the epitaph of its corresponding character.
Though some still speculate about Masters’s motive for writing Spoon River Anthology, historical and textual analysis has led to a general consensus that he wanted to make a small-town American life intelligible and relatable to a more general American audience. They provide a holistic inventory of the multitude of life narratives making up a fictional town called Spoon River, loosely based on a river that wound around Masters’s hometown, Lewistown, Illinois. Spoon River Anthology is a 1915 collection of poems written in free verse by Edgar Lee Masters, an American dramatist, lawyer, and poet.
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