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Edgar Lee Masters, the influential American poet, remains best known for his book of short poems limning the population of an imaginary Illinois town,ÊSpoon River AnthologyÊ(1916). In terse free-verse sketches, he created a cast of midwestern characters as psychologically intricate and indelibly drawn as those shortly thereafter offered in fiction by his contemporary, Sherwood Anderson, in the latter's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) -- not to mention Thornton Wilder's famous play Our Town (1938), with its third act also set in a small-town cemetery populated by ghosts who speak.

In the full sequence of several hundred poems -- which was published serially before it was issued as a complete volume -- Spoon River's dead calmly provide their own epitaphs from the local cemetery, ruminating on the dark secrets, small triumphs and major losses of their lives. The book was controversial, as its voices confessed and/or rationalized almost every imaginable sin, but it earned Masters favorable comparison with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, assuring him of a permanent place in the pantheon of U. S. literature.

Masters, who was born and grew up in the midwest and lived most of his life in Illinois, was a prominent contributor to what students of U.S. literature call "the Chicago Renaissance," noted lawyer, the Chicago law partner of the great Clarence Darrow. A progressive and anti-imperialist who wrote political tracts and speeches, a staunch opponent of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, Masters also penned numerous plays, including Maximilian (1902); novels for adults; several books for boys; biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, Mark twain, and Vachel Lindsay; and an autobiography, Across Spoon River (1936).

Not surprisingly for a poet whose work depended on close observation of human behavior, gesture, and expression, Masters referred to photography -- and to optics, and sight -- several times in Spoon River Anthology. Two of his imaginary townspeople were photographers -- Penniwit, a sensitive portraitist who apparently alienated his clientele by searching for their souls, and Rutherford McDowell, who one senses preceeded him in that role and now reminisces about his past work. Meanwhile, Margaret Fuller Slack, a writer manquŽ convinced by Penniwit's pensive study of her that she was destined for greatness, bemoans the fact that surrendering to marriage and childbearing kept her from her gift. And Dippold the Optician tries to calibrate a eyeglass prescription for someone (himself?) seemingly losing his or her grip on reality, but perhaps simply on another plane. -- A. D. Coleman

(Photo credit: "Edgar Lee Masters." Date and photographer unknown.)