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Anthology gets to heart of Masters By DENNIS CAMP

Photo by Ray Bial Lewistown's Oak Hill Cemetery

John E. Hallwas (ed). Spoon River Anthology: An Annotated Edition. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Pp. 436 with notes and photographs. $29.95 (cloth).

In his autobiography, Across Spoon River (1936), Edgar Lee Masters reports that he started writing the poems of his Spoon River Anthology after talking over former days with his mother, who was visiting her lawyer-who-wished-to-be-poet son in Chicago during May 1914. Presumably, the visit was peaceable: Masters had left home several years before, when Mother hit him in the head with a rolled window shade after they suffered a literary difference of opinion.

When he sent the poems inspired by her visit to William Marion Reedy, his discoverer, publisher and lifelong friend, Masters expected yet another rejection slip. In Masters' own words: "When I wrote these first pieces, and scrawled at the top of the page 'Spoon River Anthology,' I sat back and laughed at what seemed to me the most preposterous title known." Afterward, though, when Reedy accepted the "first pieces" for publication in his St. Louis Mirror, Masters experienced a sobering change of heart. He tried to sweeten his title as Pleasant Plains Anthology. Reedy, however, stood adamant, and the poet finally "yielded" to the publisher's judgment.

The rest is literary history: the Spoon River, not the Pleasant Plains, Anthology appeared in book form in 1915 and went through 19 printings in little more than a year. In 1916, a revised and expanded edition continued to sell, and Publishers Weekly pronounced the work "the outstanding book [of the year] — not only the outstanding book of poetry." I would like to adopt the Weekly's opinion for my own enthusiastic appraisal of John Hallwas's superb new edition of the Anthology. Borrowing Francis Bacon's well-known metaphor, here is a book not merely to be tasted or swallowed, but rather a book to be chewed and digested. Here is food for the mind and the soul; here is the book of the year.

To begin, Hallwas has given us an authoritative, standard edition of Masters' famous poems, along with an expansive introduction that focuses on all aspects of the work — from the most intensely personal to the most universal. In addition, we are given two select bibliographies, a useful map of what is now called "Edgar Lee Masters Country," several pages of relevant photographs and 72 pages of notes on individual poems.

We are given so much, in fact, that readers may be faced with a puzzling paradox: the better one knows Masters' work, the more useful Hallwas's insights will prove to be; but the more one absorbs Hallwas's insights, the better one will understand Masters' work. The sheer length of the introduction — 79 pages with 87 footnotes — is part of the difficulty. Some readers may feel that they will never reach Masters' poems.

On the other hand, what would one leave out? Hallwas begins with an overview of the Anthology's place in American literature, rightly pointing out that, although the work has always been famous, it has never been "well understood." (This edition should change that unfortunate perspective.) After mentioning the obvious — that the Antholo-

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gy is one of the seminal works in literature of the small town — Hallwas states his primary theme: the work is "a depiction of the struggle for self-realization in a society that has lost contact with the great democratic vision that once gave purpose and meaning to American lives, and an account of the poet's quest to resolve his inner conflicts and to restore that vision."

Hallwas continues with an overview of the social background of "Masters country," and includes a brief biographical sketch of the poet. He then ties the poet to the literary "naturalist" movement, stressing Masters' religious skepticism and his belief in "unseen forces" that deny human freedom.

Arguably, though, the most useful part of Hallwas's introduction is the section entitled "The Influence of Spinoza." Here new readers will be exposed to Masters' basic philosophy of life as it shapes the Anthology. This section and the following one ("The Struggle for Self-realization") are basic requirements for anyone who wishes to take Masters' work seriously. At some peril, then, I would like to try to resolve the above-stated paradox: a reader new to the Anthology should chew and digest Hallwas's introduction at least to this point, then turn directly to Masters' poems.

The rest of the introduction (which I would treat as an epilogue) focuses on the book's place in American literary and even political history, especially emphasizing the work's mythic aspects and its relation to other mythic works. This material is vital and interesting, but useful, it seems to me, only for inquiring minds who already have a basic understanding of Masters' poems.

In the end, though, no matter how Hallwas's edition is read, everyone should recognize it as one of the truly fine efforts in American literary publishing. For the first time, Edgar Lee Masters' basic vision — that central Illinois is the world — is readily available to all. �

Dennis Camp is professor emeritus of English at Sangamon State University. He has edited Vachel Lindsay's poetry and prose, published in four volumes by Spoon River Poetry Press (Marshall, Minn.) between 1984 and 1989, and he is currently writing a biography of Lindsay.

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