Edgar Lee Masters and E. A. Robinson

Location, location, location: poetry and place

What places like Tilbury Town, Spoon River, Winesburg, Ohio say about America?  The transformation from the 19^th C agricultural landscape built around the village/town to the modern industrialized city system

From Small Town America to Bright Lights, Big City

Is it better to grow up in a small town or a big city? Connectedness vs isolation, independence vs. codependence, unity vs. diversity, natural rhythm vs city that never sleeps

Free verse: no set number of syllables per line or rhyme scheme vs blank verse (10 syllables per line in unrhymed iambic pentameter)—beginnings of the modernist movement (break ties with the past traditional forms and create new unique forms)

Spoon River: characters speaking from the grave but still struggling to come to terms with the meaning of their lives and the place which “made them”—we’re all a product of our place?  Why did alcoholic church-goer feel the need to pretend to be “religious” and is drinking spiritus frumentum anti-religious?  Small-town attitude—live up to moral code that’s often more outer than inner

Lady who took the cure at Baden-Baden?  Hmmmm—means what?  Even though she has left Spoon River to go to Paris—why does she come back (dead—bury her) you can’t escape the past, what made you—she’s spent her whole life trying to escape (above the rest of the people—in the paper)  I’m as much a part of the earth as all the rest

Lucinda Matlock

I WENT to the dances at Chandlerville,

And played snap-out at Winchester.

One time we changed partners,

Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,

And then I found Davis.  How does poem juxtapose childhood games to meeting Davis?   She represents older generation—not so much about romantic love as natural attraction (“found” Davis)

We were married and lived together for seventy years,

Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,

Eight of whom we lost

Ere I had reached the age of sixty.  What’s her attitude about lost children?  It’s part of life—she accepts life on its own terms, not hers.

I spun,

I wove,

I kept the house,

I nursed the sick,

I made the garden, and for holiday

Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,

And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,

And many a flower and medicinal weed--  (traditional medicine—she knows the value of nature, she’s part of nature, not separate from it)

Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.

At ninety--six I had lived enough, that is all,

And passed to a sweet repose.  (she’s a mother earth figure, life itself)

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

Degenerate sons and daughters,   how “degenerate”—to become less sturdy/strong/vital—they’ve lost her natural vitality, life force (Henri Bergson “elan vital”)

Life is too strong for you--

It takes life to love Life.   (What does this mean?   “Life” is beyond any words that can define it.  It’s an attitude, a mode of being, a force—as soon as you cut yourself off from the force, you start to die inside.)-

Lucinda’s more alive as a dead person than many are who are alive.

Abel McVeney

I BOUGHT every kind of machine that's known--

Grinders, shellers, planters, mowers,

Mills and rakes and ploughs and threshers--

And all of them stood in the rain and sun,

Getting rusted, warped and battered,

For I had no sheds to store them in,

And no use for most of them.  (Why’s he buying all these machines?  What’s his preoccupation?  Why does he let them rust?  Why doesn’t he build a shed with them?  Materialism of the 20^th C and also faith in the machine not nature; all this junk that we rely on)

And toward the last, when I thought it over,

There by my window, growing clearer

About myself, as my pulse slowed down,  (gains understanding of his failings)

And looked at one of the mills I bought--

Which I didn't have the slightest need of,

As things turned out, and I never ran--

A fine machine, once brightly varnished,

And eager to do its work,

Now with its paint washed off--

I saw myself as a good machine

That Life had never used.    (He wasted his life—didn’t use his “tools”—which is a symbol for skills, connections to other, to Nature, didn’t develop himself—how is he different than Lucinda?  He collects, she uses, he has no purpose driving him, Life is her purpose

Editor Whedon

To be able to see every side of every question;

To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;

To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,

To use great feelings and passions of the human family

For base designs, for cunning ends,

To wear a mask like the Greek actors--

Your eight-page paper-- behind which you huddle,

Bawling through the megaphone of big type:

"This is I, the giant."    He uses the paper as a mask, print becomes a medium for influencing the public (often by perverting the truth)

Thereby also living the life of a sneak-thief,

Poisoned with the anonymous words

Of your clandestine soul.

To scratch dirt over scandal for money,

And exhume it to the winds for revenge,

Or to sell papers,

Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be,

To win at any cost, save your own life.   (Does the news work like this today?)

To glory in demoniac power, ditching civilization,

As a paranoiac boy puts a log on the track

And derails the express train.   (News is like crazy boy who derails the train?  Is the media doing this today?)

To be an editor, as I was.

Then to lie here close by the river over the place

Where the sewage flows from the village,

And the empty cans and garbage are dumped,

And abortions are hidden.  (perversion of “the word” into mere words used to destroy instead of civilize)

E.A. Robinson

“The House on the Hill” villanelle (traditional form—unlike Masters’ modernist free verse)

(a-b-a b-c-b c-d-c . . . )

Transience, mutability (change-ability) The upper class to nothing; once full of life and people and now just winds; affluence/beauty gone—even this poem remembering them is a waste—everything decays  Buddhism—everything returns to nothing

Limits to art, everything (vanitas—from Ecclesiastes)

Richard Cory—gentleman, imperially slim (European king) upper class

Everyone envies, makes pulses flutter, he is the “American dream” (money, grace, power, no job)

“we” are the bourgeois/proletarian underclass factory workers

Why does he kill himself?  He’s an inverted Christ? (bread/light)  Our materialistic worships Richard Cory (poem doesn’t tell us why he killed himself, but suggests that money/material doesn’t bring happiness/meaning)

The Simon and Garfunkel version updates Robinson but emphasizes the class division?  Which is more "poetic"? 

Aristocracy/plutocracy vs. proletarian

Marxist theory: history is history of class struggle: aristocracy  and bourgeoisie (middle class-merchant/professional class) and peasant (rural)/proletarian (urban) working class