Hortense Robbins

    My name used to be in the papers daily
    As having dined somewhere,
    Or traveled somewhere,
    Or rented a house in Paris,
    Where I entertained the nobility.
    I was forever eating or traveling,
    Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden.
    Now I am here to do honor
    To Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang.
    No one cares now where I dined,
    Or lived, or whom I entertained,
    Or how often I took the cure at Baden-Baden.

Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters was an American poet, biographer, and dramatist. Born in Kansas and raised in Illinois, Masters is best known for his collection of poems entitled "Spoon River Anthology" (1915), which is a series of epitaphs of residents of the fictional small town of Spoon River. His works reflect the everyday lives and frustrations of middle America. Masters also practiced law and wrote biographies for historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain.

Edgar Lee Masters

Shack Dye

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Russell Kincaid

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Dora Williams

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

The Unknown

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

Rosie Roberts

    I was sick, but more than that, I was mad
    At the crooked police, and the crooked game of life.
    So I wrote to the Chief of Police at Peoria:
    "l am here in my girlhood home in Spoon River,
    Gradually wasting away.
    But come and take me, I killed the son
    Of the merchant prince, in Madam Lou's
    And the papers that said he killed himself
    In his home while cleaning a hunting gun -
    Lied like the devil to hush up scandal
    For the bribe of advertising.
    In my room I shot him, at Madam Lou's,
    Because he knocked me down when I said
    That, in spite of all the money he had,
    I'd see my lover that night."

Edgar Lee Masters

Searcy Foote

    I wanted to go away to college
    But rich Aunt Persis wouldn't help me.
    So I made gardens and raked the lawns
    And bought John Alden's books with my earnings
    And toiled for the very means of life.
    I wanted to marry Delia Prickett,
    But how could I do it with what I earned?
    And there was Aunt Persis more than seventy
    Who sat in a wheel-chair half alive
    With her throat so paralyzed, when she swallowed
    The soup ran out of her mouth like a duck -
    A gourmand yet, investing her income
    In mortgages, fretting all the time
    About her notes and rents and papers.
    That day I was sawing wood for her,
    And reading Proudhon in between.
    I went in the house for a drink of water,
    And there she sat asleep in ...

Edgar Lee Masters

Mrs. Williams

    I was the milliner
    Talked about, lied about,
    Mother of Dora,
    Whose strange disappearance
    Was charged to her rearing.
    My eye quick to beauty
    Saw much beside ribbons
    And buckles and feathers
    And leghorns and felts,
    To set off sweet faces,
    And dark hair and gold.
    One thing I will tell you
    And one I will ask:
    The stealers of husbands
    Wear powder and trinkets,
    And fashionable hats.
    Wives, wear them yourselves.
    Hats may make divorces -
    They also prevent them.
    Well now, let me ask you:
    If all of the children, born here in Spoon River
    Had been reared by the
    County, somewhere on a farm;
    And the fathers and mothers had been given their freed...

Edgar Lee Masters

Josiah Tompkins

    I was well known and much beloved
    And rich, as fortunes are reckoned
    In Spoon River, where I had lived and worked.
    That was the home for me,
    Though all my children had flown afar -
    Which is the way of Nature - all but one.
    The boy, who was the baby, stayed at home,
    To be my help in my failing years
    And the solace of his mother.
    But I grew weaker, as he grew stronger,
    And he quarreled with me about the business,
    And his wife said I was a hindrance to it;
    And he won his mother to see as he did,
    Till they tore me up to be transplanted
    With them to her girlhood home in Missouri.
    And so much of my fortune was gone at last,
    Though I made the will just as he drew it,
    He profited little by it...

Edgar Lee Masters

Archibald Higbie

    I loathed you, Spoon River.
    I tried to rise above you,
    I was ashamed of you.
    I despised you
    As the place of my nativity.
    And there in Rome, among the artists,
    Speaking Italian, speaking French,
    I seemed to myself at times to be free
    Of every trace of my origin.
    I seemed to be reaching the heights of art
    And to breathe the air that the masters breathed
    And to see the world with their eyes.
    But still they'd pass my work and say:
    "What are you driving at, my friend?
    Sometimes the face looks like Apollo's
    At others it has a trace of Lincoln's."
    There was no culture, you know, in Spoon River
    And I burned with shame and held my peace.
    And what could I do, all covered over
    ...

Edgar Lee Masters

Lambert Hutchins

    I have two monuments besides this granite obelisk:
    One, the house I built on the hill,
    With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate.
    The other, the lake-front in Chicago,
    Where the railroad keeps a switching yard,
    With whistling engines and crunching wheels
    And smoke and soot thrown over the city,
    And the crash of cars along the boulevard, -
    A blot like a hog-pen on the harbor
    Of a great metropolis, foul as a sty.
    I helped to give this heritage
    To generations yet unborn, with my vote
    In the House of Representatives,
    And the lure of the thing was to be at rest
    From the never - ending fright of need,
    And to give my daughters gentle breeding,
    And a sense of security in life.
    But, you ...

Edgar Lee Masters