Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters

I Trainor, the druggist, a mixer of chemicals, The contempt of Trainor, The Druggist is plain: That Henry loved me with a husband’s love, Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived Such comparisons seem reasonable if you consult that of Amanda Barker, for example, below, which ends with the lines: In a message to a friend I described the book as an understated version of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds‘ Murder Ballads, set to verse.

Somehow, a couple of pieces of the front cover have been removed. As you can see, this is a weathered paperback copy borrowed from the Free Library of Philadelphia. My copy comes from the second printing of the 2008 Penguin edition of the Spoon River Anthology and bears an introduction by Jerome Loving. The Anthology is actually a collection of poems, each addended to the names of their confessors, all inhabitants of the graveyard in Spoon River. What’s more, I’ve never heard of Edgar Lee Masters hitherto, so why should this volume call my attention? In short, boring (what a dreadful thing to confess!).

The title, Spoon River Anthology, sounds like something provincial, about sitting on a river, a collection of stories thereabout (because this is what I associate with the word anthology). Were I to come across this book on the shelf, it would not stand out among all of those other books by MAS- last-named authors. How do we express the pleasure, the experience? Die Sache Selbst*: Spoon River Anthology But can we describe the actual pleasure? It’s really hard to say what feeling good is. We say, that was a thought-provoking book or a silly, trite book or an excellent, thrilling movie or a horrible, dumb movie, (or a good film, if we are fancy). One of the reasons I started this site was to try to write about this evanescent thing that everyone who reads/watches has had, yet no one speaks of - namely, the pleasure of reading this book or of watching this movie.

Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters