Resumen
Resumen de Antología de Spoon River
Para quién es
For readers who love short, human portraits, secrets behind small-town reputations, and American life before the First World War. It also welcomes people new to poetry who enjoy verse without rhyme or ornament.
De qué trata este libro
Spoon River Anthology is a book of poems by Edgar Lee Masters, published in 1915. Each poem is spoken by a dead person from the imaginary town of Spoon River, who lies in the cemetery on the hill. There are more than two hundred of them. Masters, a Chicago lawyer who had grown up in small towns in Illinois, drew on the people and gossip of his youth. He gave them new names and let them speak freely at last.
What do the dead say? They tell what they hid in life. A banker confesses to fraud. A wife tells how her marriage curdled. A fiddler recalls the joy of playing. A young woman remembers a love that ended too soon. Together the voices build a whole town, with its churches, courts, shops, farms and quarrels. You get the pleasure of short, sharp portraits, and the larger shock of seeing a community's polite surface stripped away. Let us begin with the hill itself, and the way the book is built.
En este resumen
- 1The dead of a town speakFree
- 2Respectable people hide their sins
- 3Marriage, love and private pain
- 4Dreamers, rebels and outsiders
- 5Plain speech and a free form
- 6What the book says about life
Idea clave 1 de 6
The dead of a town speak
The idea of the book is simple and strong. A town's cemetery holds its whole history, and the people buried there no longer have any reason to lie. Each poem is a short speech from one grave, often only a dozen or twenty lines. The speaker may give a name, a trade, a regret, a grudge or a late understanding.
The book opens with a poem called The Hill. It asks where the town's ordinary people have gone, naming a few by first name, and answers that they are all asleep on the hill. The tone is quiet and a little sad. It sets the pattern for what follows, a roll call of the common and the forgotten.
Masters gives the poems the plain look of tombstone inscriptions, but they are really confessions. The dead are not praised by a pastor or flattered by a family. They speak for themselves, and what they say often contradicts the carved stone above them. The gap between public reputation and private truth is the engine of the whole book.
The poems first appeared in a St. Louis weekly paper called Reedy's Mirror, in 1914 and 1915, under the name of Webster Ford. Readers in small towns recognized themselves, and some were angry. That reaction tells you how close to life the portraits felt.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Who’s who
- Benjamin Pantier
- Benjamin Pantier is a lawyer whose account of his unhappy marriage differs sharply from his wife's.
- Mrs. Benjamin Pantier
- Mrs. Benjamin Pantier is Benjamin's wife, whose own account challenges his understanding of their marriage.
- Fiddler Jones
- Fiddler Jones is a farmer and musician whose love of playing sets him apart from more practical neighbors.
- Lucinda Matlock
- Lucinda Matlock is a farmer's wife and mother who speaks firmly to younger generations about accepting life.
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 39,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 2 h 40 min
- Listening time4 h 25 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 13 other languages
Questions about Antología de Spoon River
What is Spoon River Anthology about?
It is a book of poems in which the dead of an imaginary Illinois town speak from their graves. They reveal secrets, regrets and private truths that contradict their public reputations.
Is Spoon River a real place?
The town is fictional, though Masters based it on towns he knew in Illinois, and there is a real Spoon River in that state. Many characters were drawn from people he knew.
When was Spoon River Anthology written and published?
The poems first appeared in a St. Louis weekly paper in 1914 and 1915 under the name Webster Ford. They were collected as a book in 1915.
Is Spoon River Anthology hard to read?
No. The poems are written in plain free verse, are mostly short, and have no rhyme scheme to decode. You can read them one at a time, in any quiet moment.
What is the main message of Spoon River Anthology?
People hide their true lives behind a respectable surface, and many regret what they never said or did. The book urges honesty, courage and a full life while there is still time.