Word: graveyard
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Unmentioned in geographies, Spoon River is a middlewestern small town that appears on every American literary map. It has been there since 1915, when Poet Edgar Lee Masters published 200-odd hard-bitten epitaphs from an imaginary small-town graveyard, entitled the collection Spoon River Anthology. Bizarre in 1915, the book's candor seems natural in 1937, thus serves as a calculus of the reading public's growing ability to accept life's poison with life's meat...
...Spoon River Anthology Poet Masters took an on-the-level look into a country graveyard, recorded what he saw with somewhat embittered candor, somewhat graveled acquiescence. In The New World, with a more opinionated candor and a more griped acquiescence he looks at U. S. history not on its level but reverentially from below and disgustedly from above, presents accordingly a vertically wall-eyed view of it. But his straightforward earnestness is as honest as his previous straightforward sight, and all U. S. readers will find themselves rising to their feet at Poet Masters' benediction...
...roads in clear daylight, and many are the variations of Arkansas's prophetic Grim Reaper that other States have concocted. They range from Oklahoma City's American Legion campaign this spring (ghosts of 85 dead paraded through the streets), to Ohio's now abandoned white graveyard crosses that marked the scenes of highway fatalities. But accidents increase and States, insurance and tire companies have about given up trying to think up gruesome warnings. The American Automobile Association says that towns where they appear find that they are bad for business...
...Because it is well known that a dose of fresh human blood is a sovereign specific against consumption, an old tea- house keeper goes to an execution, gets a roll saturated in blood for his dying son. But the son dies; the two mothers meet in the crowded graveyard, find their sons are lying next each other...
Besides his crowded family in Moscow there were friends, and their friends. Chekhov bought a dilapidated country house outside the city, to get away from visitors, soon found his household was as crowded as ever. It was a relief to get away occasionally for a quiet stroll in a graveyard. Chattering women gave him a special pain. "What a lot of idiots there are among ladies!" he exclaimed. "People have got so used to it that they no longer notice it." He liked such misogynisms as: "If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry." Chekhov finally married...