DIVAn American poetry classic, in which former citizens of a mythical midwestern town speak touchingly from the grave of the thwarted hopes and dreams of their lives. /div

From Main Street to Stranger Things, how poetry changed our idea of small town life A literary and cultural milestone, Spoon River Anthology captured an idea of the rural Midwest that became a bedrock myth of life in small-town America. Jason Stacy places the book within the atmosphere of its time and follows its progress as the poetry took root and thrived. Published by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915, Spoon River Anthology won praise from modernists while becoming an ongoing touchstone for American popular culture. Stacy charts the ways readers embraced, debated, and reshaped Masters's work in literary controversies and culture war skirmishes; in films and other media that over time saw the small town as idyllic then conflicted then surreal; and as the source of three archetypes—populist, elite, and exile—that endure across the landscape of American culture in the twenty-first century. A wide-ranging reconsideration of a literary landmark, Spoon River America tells the story of how a Midwesterner's poetry helped change a nation's conception of itself.

The memoirs of one of Illinois’ great poets, author of Spoon River Anthology, with many vignettes of the Chicago Renaissance. This intimate and provocative autobiography, first published in 1936, reveals the innermost thoughts of a great American poet. Edgar Lee Masters was a transitional figure in American literature with one foot planted in the nineteenth century and the other firmly placed on the path of what we now think of as the modern period. Richly illustrated throughout with black and white photographs. “Across Spoon River: An Autobiography is blunt and cranky about a life [Masters] saw as largely “scrappy and unmanageable.” Emphasizing life on his grandfather’s farm, his school days, his political battles, the workday world, and the growth of a poet’s mind through wide reading, the book is a valuable record of Masters’s work habits and offers considerable insight on his position as a critic and his place in American literature.”—Ronald Primeau, American National Biography

When Lacy wakes up dead in Westminster Cemetery, final resting place of Edgar Allan Poe, she's confused. It's the job of Sam, a young soldier who died in 1865, to teach her the rules of the afterlife and to warn her about Suppression—a punishment worse than death. Lacy desperately wants to leave the cemetery and find out how she died, but every soul is obligated to perform a job. Given the task of providing entertainment, Lacy proposes an open mic, which becomes a chance for the cemetery's residents to express themselves. But Lacy is in for another shock when surprising and long-buried truths begin to emerge.

Lush Diodorus sets the lads on fire, But now another has him in his net - Timarion, the boy with wanton eyes . . . Meleager, AP 12.109 Encompassing four thousand short poems and more, the ramshackle classic we call the Greek Anthology gathers up a millennium of snapshots from ancient daily life. Its influence echoes not merely in the classic tradition of the English epigram (Pope, Dryden) but in Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, Virgina Woolf, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and the poets of the First World War. Its variety is almost infinite. Victorious armies, ruined cities, and Olympic champions share space with lovers' quarrels and laments for the untimely dead - but also with jokes and riddles, art appreciation, potted biographies of authors, and scenes from country life and the workplace. This selection of more than 600 epigrams in verse is the first major translation from the Greek Anthology in nearly a century. Each of the Anthology's books of epigrams is represented here, in manuscript order, and with extensive notes on the history and myth that lie behind them.

As the first full-length critical study of Edgar Lee Masters, Beyond Spoon River is important not only for its reevaluation of this American poet and his work but also for its valuable insights into central questions of aesthetics, regionalism, and the nature and meaning of literary influence. The inordinate popularity of Spoon River Anthology has for many years unfairly restricted Masters' reputation as a "one-book phenomenon," although between 1911 and 1942 he wrote over fifty other books—most of which were neglected or misinterpreted precisely because they attempted a large-scale rewriting of what he felt had been obscured or distorted in the Anglo-American tradition. Masters' wide reading in the whole of western literature shaped his own attitudes, themes, and style, and his detailed accounts of that reading and its effect on his work form the basis for this reinterpretation of his place in American poetry in this century. After reviewing Masters' own statements on literary influence and his role as a critic, Primeau devotes the main body of his study to the major influences on Masters' work—the Greeks, Goethe, Emerson, Whitman, Shelley, and Browning. For Masters, the composite of all these influences provided a corrective to the poetry and criticism of his time, which he little admired. Primeau concludes by exploring Masters' midwestern heritage in the light of recent reinterpretations of regionalism.