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Speakers of Spoon River

•    The speakers are inhabitants (both real are imagined) of Spoon River, an area near Lewinstown and Petersburg, Illinois, where Masters spent his childhood.

•    Some characters under disguise names, lately dead or still living in the region, scandalous behavior of some of them (judges, bankers, doctor, editors, churchmen, artists, night watch, atheist, hat maker, gambler, a Negro, Annę Rutledge, first love of A. Lincoln, etc.).

•    Ali are dead, "sleeping on the hill". They died accidentally, violent or unnoticed death.

•    The discover and confess the real motives of their lives, the secret steps that stumbled them to failure or raised them to illusionary triumphs.

•    They talk about meaningless marriages, accidents and disease, economic exportation, incapability, damaged lives.

•    Death and darkness grant them the revelatory eyes for recognition of their own souls.

Masters in "Spoon River Anthology"

•    Masters clearly defends the characters - not against their sins, petty or great, for these they readily confess themselves - but against the punishments and inequalities life fixes upon us all.

•    The epitaphs are ironie an extremely objective.

Flaws of “Spoon Rlver Anthology”

•    It is bigger, morę inclusive than need to be.

•    The graveyard is overpopulated.

•    Some headstones seem repetitious.

•    There is stiffness of some verses.

•    The poems resemble a statement-like recitations and seem formal.

•    The poems are sometimes unintentionally ludicrous (provoking laughter, ridiculous, comic).

ERWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON (1869 - 1935)

Robinson's struggle

•    Robinson struggled for 25 years before wide recognition came to him in 1922 with the first of the three Pulitzer Prizes he would win.

•    He is best known for his poems about the people who lived in the fictional New England "Tli bury Town".

Tilbury Town

•    Poetic method: vignettes.

•    Vignette - a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a strong impression about a character, an idea, or a setting and sometimes an object.

•    "Tilbury Town" - In Maine (Robinson's hometown was Gardiner, Maine).

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