Author: Edgar Lee Masters

Language: English

Summary: The Spoon River Anthology is a collection of 245 free-verse epitaphs in the form of monologues. They are spoken from beyond the grave by former residents of a dreary, confining small town like those Masters himself had known during his Illinois boyhood.

The speakers tell of their hopes and ambitions and of their bitter, unrealized lives. The realistic poems proved controversial when they were first published, for they contradicted the popular view of small towns as repositories of moral virtue and respectability. (britannica)

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