I had another FFB ready to go today, but I'm holding it for another week and running this unaltered repeat from 2011. Why? Because on Wednesday night, I turned on XM radio to see what was playing, and I got in on the beginning of a program called CBS Radio Workshop. The episode I heard was called "Epitaph," and it was narrated and directed by William Conrad. There was a star-studded cast (I remember only John McIntire, Richard Crenna, and Howard McNear) reading poems from Spoon River Anthology. I was hooked and had to listen. The show was originally broadcast in 1957, and Conrad said that the book was "scarcely remembered." I suspect that it was in 1957 or 1958 that I was having the experience with the book that I mention below. The book was clearly alive to me, at least, and Masters was still found in high school textbooks. Here's what I said four years ago:Maybe this book isn't really forgotten, but I have a feeling not many people read it these days. It was a sensation when it was originally published, though. Masters had written many books before this one, and he wrote even more afterward, but none had the same effect.
When I was in high school, I thought I'd write poetry all my life. I read all kinds of poetry and loved 99% of it, including the poems by Masters that were in our high school textbook. I checked Spoon River out of the library and read all of it. I was highly impressed, but I'd never looked at it since then. I picked up a copy the other day at a library sale and started to read. It was like visiting old friends, though none of them is alive. Lucinda Matlock, Hod Putt, Judge Somers, Benjamin Pantier (buried with his dog), Anne Rutledge, and so many others, "all, all, are sleeping on the hill," as they have been all my life, but they're still as eloquent as ever. Small-town life hadn't been depicted like this before, and if Masters never had another success like this one, he doesn't have to worry about winding up like his character John Horace Burleson. Masters wrote one mighty book that works as well for me today as it did more than 50 years ago.
17 comments:
This is one I am going to read again. Thanks!
Bill, I have never read Edgar Lee Masters' poetry but now I certainly will. Thanks for spotlighting Masters.
It's a real change of pace from what I usually mention here. But many of the poems do have their noir aspects.
You forgot to add: you miss the old days.
Jeff
You're right. I do miss the old days.
I bought and read this after that previous review, and enjoyed it much more than I had in reading excerpts back in high school. Thanks for that original review, and for this repeat.
Knowing that one person read it makes that first time worthwhile.
The even more forgotten J. C. Squire combined Masters with Thomas Grey' Elegy in a Country Churchyard and- I think- improved on both: http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.co.uk/2005/04/if-gray-had-had-to-write-his-elegy-in.html
Thanks for the link. I got a kick out of that.
I know I finished this book. I am sure of it. But, I cannot find any notes.
Company K came out in '33 and William March used the same format.
Didn't know that about Company K. I used to see the paperback of that one frequently.
I should clarify that march did not use poetry.
I must admit "The Village Atheist" helped put me off. But I admired the ambition and concept. WINESBURG, OHIO seemed not quite as bold.
Interesting Todd should mention WINESBURG, OHIO, which I also read, right after SPOON RIVER. I wonder why they go together in our minds?
I love Spoon River. When I was a theatre major, and in my early acting days, I used to use some of the poems from it as audition monologues. They're compact, in first person, and such really lovely character sketches, so they were perfect.
Yes, they worked great on the radio.
Richard, belatedly...they go together as similar approaches to a town/group of people observed, more closely than most such works previously, by a linked collection of shorter works.
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