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Thread: Edgar Lee Masters

  1. #1
    Bibliophile JBI's Avatar
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    Edgar Lee Masters

    A very simple to understand, yet infinitely complex poet, I find. I find it strange that he has no forum on this forum, so I think I'll post some pieces.

    His most famous work, Spoon River Anthology details different point of views from the fictional town of Spoon River. Each narrator has his own free-verse short poem, written in an unusual style, providing a time-stopped image of the fictional village.

    From Spoon River Anthology published in 1915, the first poem of the anthology:

    The Hill

    Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
    The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
    All, all are sleeping on the hill.

    One passed in a fever,
    One was burned in a mine,
    One was killed in a brawl,
    One died in a jail,
    One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife-
    All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

    Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
    The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?--
    All, all are sleeping on the hill.

    One died in shameful child-birth,
    One of a thwarted love,
    One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
    One of a broken pride, in the search for heart's desire;
    One after life in far-away London and Paris
    Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag--
    All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

    Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
    And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
    And Major Walker who had talked
    With venerable men of the revolution?--
    All, all are sleeping on the hill.

    They brought them dead sons from the war,
    And daughters whom life had crushed,
    And their children fatherless, crying--
    All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
    Where is Old Fiddler Jones
    Who played with life all his ninety years,
    Braving the sleet with bared breast,
    Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
    Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
    Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
    Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary's Grove,
    Of what Abe Lincoln said
    One time at Springfield.

  2. #2
    Registered User quasimodo1's Avatar
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    Edgar Lee Masters

    Fiddler Jones
    by Edgar Lee Masters



    ...To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
    Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
    They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
    Stepping it off, to "Toor-a-Loor."
    How could I till my forty acres
    Not to speak of getting more,
    With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
    Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
    And the creak of a wind-mill--only these?
    And I never started to plow in my life
    That some one did not stop in the road
    And take me away to a dance or picnic.
    I ended up with forty acres;
    I ended up with a broken fiddle--
    And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
    And not a single regret.

    {excerpt}

  3. #3
    Bibliophile JBI's Avatar
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    Quas, feel free to take full cuttings. It was published in 1915, and therefore is in the public domain.

  4. #4
    Registered User quasimodo1's Avatar
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    Edgar Lee Masters

    Darrow 2 (unpublished)

    This is a man with an old face, always old...

    There was pathos, in his face, and in his eyes.

    The early weariness; and sometimes tears in his eyes,

    Which he let slip unconsciously on his cheek,

    Or brushed away with an unconcerned hand.

    There were tears for human suffering, or for a glance

    Into the vast futility of life,

    Which he had seen from the first, being old

    When he was born.

    --Edgar Lee Masters (1922)

  5. #5
    Registered User quasimodo1's Avatar
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    Edgar Lee Masters and Clarence Darrow

    Clarence Darrow
    This is Darrow,

    Inadequately scrawled, with his young, old heart,

    And his drawl, and his infinite paradox

    And his sadness, and kindness,

    And his artist sense that drives him to shape his life

    To something harmonious, even against the schemes of God.

    --Edgar Lee Masters (1922)

  6. #6
    Registered User quasimodo1's Avatar
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    Edgar Lee Masters and Clarence Darrow

    Abstract
    War and Degradation in Edgar Lee Masters and

    William Carlos Williams
    José Marıa Rodrıguez Garcıa11Cornell

    University1Cornell University
    Abstract
    ELM and WCW are two of the most significant

    nativist American poets of the early twentieth

    century. Not only did they adhere to roughly the

    same ideology of progressive liberalism, laying

    emphasis on the radical potential inherent in a

    more democratic cultural politics, but throughout

    their writing careers they sought, with varying

    degrees of success, a return to the autochthonous

    roots of American culture at the expense of the

    cosmopolitan and Eurocentric faction of modernism

    that was to become hegemonic in the 1920s, with

    the consecration of T.S. Eliot as the leading poet

    and critic of his generation. In this essay I examine

    some key texts by both ELM and WCW in which the

    experience of war and the vocabulary of

    degradation and filth take center stage. This

    interest in destruction and decay can be connected

    to important crises in the two authors' personal

    lives as well as to larger social and political issues.

    My conclusion will be that of the two poets only

    WCW succeeds in going beyond the mere criticism

    of the genteel and bourgeois cultural traditions in

    place in his time to envision imaginatively the

    regeneration of America through a dialectics of

    destruction and creation, death and rebirth. ------

    http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1034/

    j.1600-0730.2003.580201.x
    Last edited by quasimodo1; 04-26-2008 at 11:02 PM. Reason: title should read Edgar Lee Masters and William Carlos Williams

  7. #7
    Registered User quasimodo1's Avatar
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    chronology of Edgar Lee Masters

    Chronology:

    1868 Edgar Lee Masters is born August 23 in Garnett, Kansas, son of Hardin W. Masters and Emma Dexter Masters.

    1869 Masters family returns to the Illinois farm of Harding’s parents in Menard County near Pertersburg.

    1870-1880 Spends childhood in and around Petersburg, Illinois.

    Younger brother Alexander dies of diphtheria, age five, in 1878.

    Best friend Mitch Miller dies 1879.

    1880-1890 Family moves to Lewistown, Illinois.

    Masters attends Lewistown high school, graduating in 1886.

    Publishes his first writing in Chicago Daily News.

    Works in his father’s law office.

    1891-1892 Admitted to the Illinois Bar.

    Moves to Chicago.

    Works as bill collector for Edison Company.

    1893 Establishes first law office in Chicago with Kicksham Scanlon.

    Writes play Benedict Arnold.

    1898 A Book of Verses.

    Marries Helen Jenkins on June 21.

    1899 Son Hardin Masters born.

    1900-1902 "The Constitution and Our Insular Possessions."

    Maximillion, a play.

    Articles in Chicago Chronicle.

    1903-1908 Law partnership with Clarence Darrow.

    Two daughters born, Madeline and Marcia.

    New Star Chamber (1904).

    Plays: The Blood of the Prophets (1905), Althea (1907), The Trifler (1908).

    1909 Play, The Leaves of the Tree.

    Affair with Tennessee Mitchell; wife refuses to divorce him.

    1910 Plays, Eileen and The Locket.

    Songs and Sonnets published under pseudonym Webster Ford.

    1911 Sets up private law practice.

    Ends affair with Tennessee Mitchell.

    Play, The Bread of Idleness.

    1912 Songs and Sonnets, Second Series.

    1914 "Spoon River" epitaphs appear under pseudonym Webster Ford in Reedy’s

    Mirror on May 29.

    Masters reveals authorship in November.

    1915 Spoon River Anthology in book form.

    1916 The Great Valley and Songs and Satires, poems.

    New edition of Spoon River Anthology with thirty-two new poems.

    1917-1919 Leaves wife and family.

    Toward the Gulf (1918), Starved Rock (1919), poems.

    1920 Gives up law practice and moves to New York.

    Domesday Book, long poetic narrative.

    Mitch Miller, novel for boys.

    1921 The Open Sea, poems.

    Trip to Europe.

    Wife begins divorce litigation.

    1922 Children of the Marketplace, A Fictitious Autobiography, biography of Stephen

    Douglas.

    1923 The Nuptial Flight, novel.

    Skeeters Kirby, sequel to Mitch Miller.

    Divorce final.

    1924 Mirage, sequel to Skeeters Kirby.

    The New Spoon River, collecton of poems similar to those in Spoon River

    Anthology.

    1925 Selected Poems.

    Extensive Lecture Tour.

    1926 Lee, A Dramatic Poem.

    Marries Ellen Coyne, thirty years his junior.

    1927 Kit O’Brien, boys’ book.

    Levy Mayer and the New Industrial Era, biography.

    1928 Jack Kelso, A dramatic poem.

    Son born to Ellen Coyne Masters, named Hilary Masters.

    Father, Hardin Masters dies.

    1929 Fate of the Jury, epilogue to Domesday Book.

    1930 Lichee Nuts, poems, and Gettysburg, Manila, Acoma, dramatic poetry.

    1931 Godbey, A Dramatic Poem, sequel to Jack Kelso.

    Lincoln: The Man, biography.

    1932-1934 The Tale of Chicago (1933), history.

    The Serpent in the Wilderness (1933), peoms.

    Moroni, Richmond, four Dramatic Duologues, plays.

    1935 Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America, biography.

    Invisible Landscapes, poems.

    1936 Autobiography, Across Spoon River.

    The Golden Fleece of California, poetic narrative.

    Poems of People.

    Awarded Mark Twain silver medal.

    1937 The New World, long narrative poem.

    The Tide of Time, novel.

    Whitman, biography.

    1938 Mark Twain: A Portrait, biography.

    1939 More People, poems.

    1940 Edits The Living Thoughts of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

    1941 Poetry Society of America Award.

    Illinois Poems.

    1942 Along Illinois, poetry.

    The Sangamon, non-fiction.

    Received grant from American Academy of Arts and Letters and National

    Institute of Arts and Letters.

    1943-1949 Health deteriorates.

    Received Shelley Memorial Award (1944)

    1950 Dies March 5 and is buried at Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois. http://www.millikin.edu/aci/Crow/chr...astersbio.html
    Last edited by quasimodo1; 04-27-2008 at 07:51 PM. Reason: link

  8. #8
    Registered User quasimodo1's Avatar
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    Edgar Lee Masters

    The Circuit Judge



    Take note, passers-by, of the sharp erosions
    Eaten in my head-stone by the wind and rain —
    Almost as if an intangible Nemesis or hatred
    Were marking scores against me,
    But to destroy, and not preserve, my memory.
    I in life was the Circuit Judge, a maker of notches,
    Deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored,
    Not on the right of the matter.
    O wind and rain, leave my head-stone alone!
    For worse than the anger of the wronged,
    The curses of the poor,
    Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear,
    Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer,
    Hanged by my sentence,
    Was innocent in soul compared with me.

  9. #9
    Registered User quasimodo1's Avatar
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    Edgar Lee Masters

    ~SILENCE~I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
    And the silence of the city when it pauses,
    And the silence of a man and a maid,
    And the silence of the sick
    When their eyes roam about the room.
    And I ask: For the depths,
    Of what use is language?
    A beast of the field moans a few times
    When death takes its young.
    And we are voiceless in the presence of realities --
    We cannot speak.

    A curious boy asks an old soldier
    Sitting in front of the grocery store,
    "How did you lose your leg?"
    And the old soldier is struck with silence,
    Or his mind flies away
    Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
    It comes back jocosely
    And he says, "A bear bit it off."
    And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
    Dumbly, feebly lives over
    The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
    The shrieks of the slain,
    And himself lying on the ground,
    And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
    And the long days in bed.
    But if he could describe it all
    He would be an artist.
    But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
    Which he could not describe.

    There is the silence of a great hatred,
    And the silence of a great love,
    And the silence of an embittered friendship.
    There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
    Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
    Comes with visions not to be uttered
    Into a realm of higher life.
    There is the silence of defeat.
    There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
    And the silence of the dying whose hand
    Suddenly grips yours.
    There is the silence between father and son,
    When the father cannot explain his life,
    Even though he be misunderstood for it.

    There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
    There is the silence of those who have failed;
    And the vast silence that covers
    Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
    There is the silence of Lincoln,
    Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
    And the silence of Napoleon
    After Waterloo.
    And the silence of Jeanne d'Arc
    Saying amid the flames, "Blessed Jesus" --
    Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
    And there is the silence of age,
    Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
    In words intelligible to those who have not lived
    The great range of life.

    And there is the silence of the dead.
    If we who are in life cannot speak
    Of profound experiences,
    Why do you marvel that the dead
    Do not tell you of death?
    Their silence shall be interpreted
    As we approach them.

    Poet: Edgar Lee Masters

  10. #10
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    Edgar Lee Masters, poet and lawyer

    Edgar Lee Masters as Trial Lawyer and Reader

    by Ronald Primeau

    Masters' classical education and training in forensics keyed his sensitivity to analytical rigor and taught him to enjoy looking for and dissecting the influences on his own thinking. His background in philosophy as well as his practical experience in the courtroom made him introspective, even self-conscious, about his own theories as he worked them out. Although only a few of his books show the direct effects of trial experiences, nearly everything he wrote displays a lawyer's appetite for theoretical exchange. His comments about authors from the past and his own career often took on the cast of a legal debate. At times, he presented discussions of his wide reading like a series of courtroom exhibits offered as evidence to help his readers reach a verdict.

    For Masters, reading was an energizer which provided new ideas and literary models against which he measured his own goals, accomplishments, and failures. He learned through imitation, identification, and transformation. He often revised sources even as he acknowledged a debt to them. He was never reluctant to rewrite history, to reclaim overlooked accomplishment, or to disclaim ill-conceived repute.------------------- http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poe...ers/lawyer.htm

  11. #11
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    Edgar Lee Masters

    Dora Williams



    When Reuben Pantier ran away and threw me
    I went to Springfield. There I met a lush,
    Whose father just deceased left him a fortune.
    He married me when drunk. My life was wretched.
    A year passed and one day they found him dead.
    That made me rich. I moved on to Chicago.
    After a time met Tyler Rountree, villain.
    I moved on to New York. A gray-haired magnate
    Went mad about me — so another fortune.
    He died one night right in my arms, you know.
    (I saw his purple face for years thereafter.)
    There was almost a scandal. I moved on,
    This time to Paris. I was now a woman,
    Insidious, subtle, versed in the world and rich.
    My sweet apartment near the Champs Élysées
    Became a center for all sorts of people,
    Musicians, poets, dandies, artists, nobles,
    Where we spoke French and German, Italian, English.
    I wed Count Navigato, native of Genoa.
    We went to Rome. He poisoned me, I think.
    Now in the Campo Santo overlooking
    The sea where young Columbus dreamed new worlds,
    See what they chiseled: "Contessa Navigato
    Implora eterna quiete."

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    Who are the children?

    "Mrs. Charles Bliss"

    Reverend Wiley advised me not to divorce him
    For the sake of the children,
    And Judge Somers advised him the same.
    So we stuck to the end of the path.
    But two of the children thought he was right,
    And two of the children thought I was right.
    And the two who sided with him blamed me,
    And the two who sided with me blamed him.
    And they grieved for the one they sided with.
    And all were torn with the guilt of judging,
    And tortured in soul because they could not admire
    Equally him and me.
    Now every gardener knows that plants grown in cellars
    Or under stones are twisted and yellow and weak.
    And no mother would let her baby suck
    Diseased milk from her breast.
    Yet preachers and judges advise the raising of souls
    Where there is no sunlight, but only twilight,
    No warmth, but only dampness and cold-
    Preachers and judges!


    "Rev. Lemuel Wiley"

    I preached four thousand sermons,
    I conducted forty revivals,
    And baptized many converts.
    Yet no deed of mine
    Shine brighter in the memory of the world,
    And none is treasured more by me:
    Look how I saved the Blisses from divorce,
    And kept the children free from that disgrace,
    To grow up into moral men and women,
    Happy themselves, a credit to the village.

    By Edgar Lee Masters

    Does anyone know who the children are..are they written about in another Spoon River poem?..

    I just started reading them but what to know NOW if possible...lol

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