Spoon River Anthology Themes Share Skeletons in the Closet Many of the Spoon River villagers have taken secrets with them to their graves. The introductory poems, 'The Hill'( Masters, 2022, p. Spoon River Anthology Study Guide Edgar Lee Masters Study Guide Documents Q&As Discussions Download a PDF to print or study offline.

Thanks to this process, they become both protagonists and narrators of their existence, and are able to reflect on the forces that moved it, as death gave them the necessary detachment to do so. Spoon River Anthology (1915) by Edgar Lee Masters, a collection of autobiographical verse monologues in epitaph form, was named by Eliot Weinberger as the century’s most influential. By using epitaphs, Master actually maintains the objectivity of naturalism, to the extent that the characters portray themselves as they truly are in essence, beyond the veil of life and death. In fact, death gave to all of them a unique opportunity to express themselves freed from any social or moral barrier forcing them to depict euphemistic representations of their life 'the characters of the Anthology state all the facts necessary to a delineation of their lives without any concerted effort, considering the whole work, to warp the facts to fit a preconceived, single judgement of life' (Wolf, 1940, p. However, it is precisely the fact that the characters speaking in the Anthology are dead that grants their monologues the necessary amplitude to portray the reality of their life, and in doing so, to recreate that of Spoon River. It is, indeed, quite surprising for a naturalist poet to use a supernatural element to depict his reality. At first sight, it may seems paradoxal that, while aiming for an accurate representation of reality, the poet uses the voices of dead people, in the form 'self epitaphs'.

Spoon river anthology