Word: spoonful
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When in 1914 the first poems of Spoon River Anthology were published in Reedy's Mirror, U. S. poets, critics and plain readers felt that they were at last hearing an authentic U. S. voice. Few poems have had such an immediate and widespread influence. The book was translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Danish, German, Swedish and Japanese, was praised, parodied, attacked and widely sold (80,000 volumes in 1915-16). To a generation that had revolted against the superficial optimism, the stock poses of genteel poets, the 200-odd austere epitaphs of Spoon River were more than...
Edgar Lee Masters wrote Spoon River under the pseudonym of Webster Ford because he deeply distrusted the value of this work. A Chicago lawyer of 45, he was fighting a case in the Supreme Court of Illinois and an injunction against the Waitresses' Union while his poems were meeting their first extraordinary response. Born in Garnett, Kans., in 1869, he had spent most of his life in Illinois, where he learned the printing trade, worked on newspapers, studied law and wrote thin volumes of conventional verse. Like so many of his generation he looked upon poetry less...
...essential note in Spoon River was one of protest, of radical nationalism, of bitter resentment that U. S. poets and artists were so consistently abused and neglected by the country at large. In subsequent volumes Masters' poems, characterized by long speculations on vague concepts of life, nature, the soul, contrasted oddly with the concise, concrete images of recognizable human fates that had been the distinction of Spoon River...
...reputation for gruffness, Edgar Lee Masters lives in an obscure hotel in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, seldom appears at New York literary gatherings. Since he dresses carelessly, wears heavy spectacles and a characteristic expression of thin-lipped disapproval, he looks not unlike some Midwestern deacon described in Spoon River Anthology. Baldish, he dislikes being photographed except when wearing a hat. Hilary, his 7-year-old son by his second marriage, summers with him in New York, winters in Kansas City with his mother...
...insistence on economy has had one less happy result this autumn. Finding that pupils who fail of promotion were costing the city $300,000, he ordered the tempo of teaching slowed down. Primary pupils will have less reading: algebra will be taught later in high school; Latin will be spoon...