Rating: 
Summary: The Best Wisdom Poetry Of Our Age
Review: "The dead can tell us, being dead, what no living personcan tell us," wrote T.S. Eliot. What Masters has done for us(when he was alive) is write a collection of whispered epitaphs,voices silently crying out from the graves the ironies, sadnesses, wastes, agonies, and miscalculations of their spent lives.This is not poetry to turn a phrase, necessarily. Nor is it poetry to enchant. Instead, it is Wisdom Poetry. Poetry that carries the weight of mistakes of the twisted lives, creating their own kind of hell (Hobbes: "Hell is truth too late learned"). Written in 1915 and written as if for choral voices--wouldn't this be a great piece for a dramatic interpretation in which several voices perform each poem? Collected, it becomes overwhelming, just as a visit to a cemetary to mourn the losses of one of your loves can also be overwhelming. No, it is not sad, though. Somehow, hope still survives, like the shoot stabbing through the cracked granite toward the sun.
Rating:
Summary: Arguably the greatest work of American literature
Review: A person could read this marvelous literary effort as a series of free-verse poems depicting individual voices from the grave who can finally speak honestly, protected by the shadow of death. But to read this work in such a manner is to avoid its essence. Read more carefully. Spoon River Anthology is a timeless portrait of the human story. Each character is different, yet all are part of the composite of a small town. It could have been a big city or a widespread area with few people. The stories would differ in fact, perhaps, but the tale would be same. You will meet over a hundred matchless, never-to-be-forgotten characters, including George Gray, who wasted his life by shrinking from it, A.D. Blood, the town prohibitionist, who hated liquor so much he killed a man who was drunk, a politician, Hamilton Greene, whose mother was actually a servant girl to his father, but who never knew it, people who scorned life and were scorned by it in turn, people who loved life despite its adversity, people who wantonly ruined the lives of others, people who were dashed against life's shoals by the ruthless, people who were buried in the wrong grave, and on, and on, and on. Each page is a precious gem reflecting someone you know, or even part of you, large or small. The English is beyond merely superb. It is simply scintillating, and so astoundingly good in terms of word and vocabulary selection as to leave the reader amazed. One facet that was most enjoyable was the number of attorneys and judges who spoke. Masters, of course, practiced law for a number of years, and used this experience to depict realistic portraits of many lawyers, all of whom anyone in the law knows all to well. Carefully perused, the work is truly a novel, not a mere series of poems, and a great novel. Masters apparently poured his whole being into the effort, since he never remotely produced anything of its quality again. Buy, read it a bit at a time. You will treasure it always. My recommendation is so high as to be off the scale.
Rating:
Summary: Prehaps the greatest overlooked American poet
Review: America has had many great poets, any short list of American poets would include Longfellow, Whitman, Poe, Dickinson, and Frost. Regrettably, Edgar Lee Masters would not be on many of those lists. It is a shame because Spoon River Anthology is such an American collection of poems. Masters is as a poet, what Norman Rockwell is as a painter: a man who captured the spirit of America. An exercise in Americana? Undoubtedly. But Master's is not whose eye were blind to the faults and foibles of America. His America, embodied in Spoon River, IL, is an America with faults, with problems; it is at the same time an America with hope with a future and at its core--a basically good nation. If for no other reason, I am an advocate of Masters because he is the poet who made me fall in love with poetry.
Rating:
Summary: THis was the best!
Review: Edgar Lee Master is a master at poetry! I liked reading about the people in this town, it was like I was there! I loved the book!!!
Rating:
Summary: Important to another century ...
Review: Edgar Lee Masters was a Chicago attorney who, long before Lake Woebegone, wrote of the mythical village of Spoon River, IL. Specifically, of the real stories of the people in it's graveyard. Now that they're dead the truth can finally be told. And almost all of them lived lives of terrible lies. I was introduced to it in Jr. High, was blown away at the realization that people all around me probably had these same kinds of secrets, living with them hidden, or hoped they were hidden. Paraphrasing, "I was of the party of Prohibition (anti-alcohol), villagers thought I died from eating watermelon. It was my liver. Every day at noon I slipped behind the partition at the drug store and had a generous drink from the bottle labeled Spiritum Fermenti!" The several poems that introduce Hamilton Greene are as powerful as anything I've ever read. Do yourself a huge favor, read this book! And then imagine yourself in the Spoon River graveyard, finally able to tell the truth about your life.
Rating:
Summary: If the dead could talk
Review: Edgar Lee Masters's "Spoon River Anthology" is a poem in long form comprising over two hundred free-verse sketches, each representing and narrated by a deceased resident of a fictional town located on the Spoon River in western Illinois. The dead talk not so much about their town as they do about themselves and the pivotal events that either transformed their lives or caused their deaths. Like Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," the book exposes the depression, restlessness, and corruption that lurk behind the facade of small-town middle American sanctity with an almost constant focus on death that makes it even more grim. If you're looking for something cheerful to read, you might want to pass on this. "Spoon River Anthology" has perhaps the highest character-to-page ratio of any work in literature. Many of the narratives are interrelated in the sense that different people involved in a particular situation present their respective arguments which may be defensive apologies or rationalizations or vindictive taunts. The names of the characters are often indicative of their personalities; appellations like Isaiah Beethoven, Voltaire Johnson, and Percy Bysshe Shelley show that Spoon River is hardly a haven for subtlety. The most commonly mentioned character is the wealthy Thomas Rhodes, the failure of whose bank had caused financial ruin to many of the town's residents, although we learn later that the culpability rests with his son Ralph's bad loans and speculations. George Reece, the innocent cashier, took the rap and was sent to prison; his wife in her narrative advises the reader of her epitaph to "memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty." She did so herself, taking a line from Alexander Pope, which enabled her to raise her children "clean and strong" in the face of hardship. In Spoon River, lives of quiet desperation result in a cemetery of yapping corpses, lamenting wasted youth and lost chances. Margaret Fuller Slack tells us that she aspired to be a novelist "as great as George Eliot" but marriage and motherhood cost her all of her time; her death from lockjaw is "ironical" because presumably she had so much to say. Searcy Foote confesses remorselessly that he murdered his invalid aunt for money and personal freedom. Zilpha Marsh, the ouija-board reader, was regarded as a fool when she would report to the townspeople that she had made contact with the spirit of a notorious figure from the past; the present tense of her narrative suggests that she is unaware that now she, too, is merely in the past. Every single narrative in this fantastic collection is worthy of commentary; to mention just a few risks a skewed impression of the whole because the "Anthology" really must be read in its entirety to grasp its context. However, there is one more feature which must be noted: The "Anthology" ends with a fragment of an epic poem by Jonathan Swift Somers, one of the deceased. Apparently it is a parody of the Iliad, and naturally it is called the Spooniad, drawing a parallel between the fall of Troy and that of Rhodes's bank. Somers did not live to complete this ambitious project, which is just as well since in Spoon River death affords a distinction few living poets can hope to attain.
Rating:
Summary: If the dead could talk
Review: Edgar Lee Masters's "Spoon River Anthology" is a poem in long form comprising over two hundred free-verse sketches, each representing and narrated by a deceased resident of a fictional town located on the Spoon River in western Illinois. The dead talk not so much about their town as they do about themselves and the pivotal events that either transformed their lives or caused their deaths. Like Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," the book exposes the depression, restlessness, and corruption that lurk behind the facade of small-town middle American sanctity with an almost constant focus on death that makes it even more grim. If you're looking for something cheerful to read, you might want to pass on this. "Spoon River Anthology" has perhaps the highest character-to-page ratio of any work in literature. Many of the narratives are interrelated in the sense that different people involved in a particular situation present their respective arguments which may be defensive apologies or rationalizations or vindictive taunts. The names of the characters are often indicative of their personalities; appellations like Isaiah Beethoven, Voltaire Johnson, and Percy Bysshe Shelley show that Spoon River is hardly a haven for subtlety. The most commonly mentioned character is the wealthy Thomas Rhodes, the failure of whose bank had caused financial ruin to many of the town's residents, although we learn later that the culpability rests with his son Ralph's bad loans and speculations. George Reece, the innocent cashier, took the rap and was sent to prison; his wife in her narrative advises the reader of her epitaph to "memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty." She did so herself, taking a line from Alexander Pope, which enabled her to raise her children "clean and strong" in the face of hardship. In Spoon River, lives of quiet desperation result in a cemetery of yapping corpses, lamenting wasted youth and lost chances. Margaret Fuller Slack tells us that she aspired to be a novelist "as great as George Eliot" but marriage and motherhood cost her all of her time; her death from lockjaw is "ironical" because presumably she had so much to say. Searcy Foote confesses remorselessly that he murdered his invalid aunt for money and personal freedom. Zilpha Marsh, the ouija-board reader, was regarded as a fool when she would report to the townspeople that she had made contact with the spirit of a notorious figure from the past; the present tense of her narrative suggests that she is unaware that now she, too, is merely in the past. Every single narrative in this fantastic collection is worthy of commentary; to mention just a few risks a skewed impression of the whole because the "Anthology" really must be read in its entirety to grasp its context. However, there is one more feature which must be noted: The "Anthology" ends with a fragment of an epic poem by Jonathan Swift Somers, one of the deceased. Apparently it is a parody of the Iliad, and naturally it is called the Spooniad, drawing a parallel between the fall of Troy and that of Rhodes's bank. Somers did not live to complete this ambitious project, which is just as well since in Spoon River death affords a distinction few living poets can hope to attain.
Rating: 
Summary: Surprisingly Interesting
Review: Had to read this for school & was at first put off by its irrelevance to anything current. However, was completely drawn in & swept away. A really good read - moving & timeless.
Rating:
Summary: It's a great book
Review: I am a high school student, i had a list of books to chose from and i chose this one. This is one of the best books i've ever had to read in high school. I like reading about people and learning how they died and what their life was like. Spoon river antholagies is a book you will pick up and not be able to put down. I'm really glad i read it, and i'll read it over and over again. Reading this book helped me to get better at reading and understanding poetry.
Rating:
Summary: About Life and Death
Review: I choose read this book the reason, is because manufactures my research paper. Because I am attracted by its theme. I extremely like reading the prose poetry anthology, Edgar lee master's work on happen to conform to my reading need, I in make my research paper time, my English teacher explained for me many about this book meaning, I was not at that time understood very much, because my English proficiency is not very high, but my teacher emphasized had been born of dying, I on by this depth deep attraction, I am tried to read it, I inside discovered the verse extremely only is beautiful, he described many about the life and the romantic love, Respective sound from the grave which possibly honestly finally speaks, is protected by the death shadow. This a series of stories occur in the small town, is matter which the big city cannot occur, all these attract you to explore another different world, although all these let you think not really, but it may purify your mind, lets you feel the different life.
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