The book was a literary sensation and huge commercial success. Meyers, the doctor’s wife, believes her husband deserved the town’s scorn for breaking “the law human and divine.” Butch Weldy, on the other hand, never mentions the rape but tells us he “got religion and steadied down.” Doctor Meyers, the abortionist, blames Minerva for his own death in jail saying, “I tried to help her out.” Mrs. Minerva Jones tells us she was raped by Butch Weldy and died during an abortion. Meant to be read as a novel, the reader is required to piece together narratives from single lines and fragments contained in individual poems. Herndon, the law partner of Abraham Lincoln, and Anne Rutledge, considered Lincoln’s first love. In a few instances, he used real names, such as William H. Henry Phipps was really banker Henry Phelps. In some cases, Masters barely changed their names. Masters gleaned tidbits of stories and gossip he heard during the time he spent in Lewistown and nearby Petersburg, where his grandparents lived. “No volume of poetry since Whitman’s Leaves of Grass had attempted so much or had been so original,” says Hallwas.Įach postmortem poem in the collection is titled with the name of the citizen who reveals some truth about their daily existence in Spoon River. Freed by the shackles of life, the un-living who “sleep beneath these weeds” confess their deepest secrets, disappointments, frustrations, joys, and warnings to the living in the form of brutally honest free verse poems.
In the groundbreaking work, Masters, a onetime law partner of Clarence Darrow, gives voice to more than two hundred deceased citizens of Spoon River who are laid to rest in Oak Hill Cemetery, known to the locals as The Hill. Hallwas, author of Spoon River Anthology: An Annotated Edition. “Although such experiences and views were part of American culture, poets had not written about them before,” says John E.
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