Rating: 
Summary: Stirring epitaphs? No; dead boring.
Review: If you get an edition, such as "Signet Classic", that includes The Spooniad and the Epilogue, then you will have three bad works of poetry to wade through, the last two blessedly short.
The idea is a good one; a series of monologues from dead former townspeople, touching the major incidents of their lives, many of them connected, sometimes in surprising ways. But Masters is just not a good enough poet. He attempts blank verse monologues in the style of Robert Frost (as in North of Boston) but succeeds only in demonstrating how difficult a form it is and how it takes the brilliance of someone like Frost to pull it off. I can see that a few of them are worthwhile and would themselves make good anthology pieces, but mostly they are simply second rate prose poems of no significance.
In my review of Winesburg, Ohio I compared Sherwood Anderson unfavorably with Masters, saying that he lacked Masters' humanity. But - like most people, I suspect - I had only read selections from Spoon River. Now that I have paddled the length of it, I can tell you it is meandering, flows very slowly, and contains very little life.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent reading! Rates #1 in "Spoon River Illinois"
Review: Ilive in Spoon River (Lewistown Illinois) Masters came from here, and he covered human nature at its worst and best after he left here. The book has been at the top of students and in theatres since it was published' I am the historian here in Lewistown Ill. and the characters are as alive today as they were then! It is 'must' reading for all literature lovers, American or English styles. Masters left here in 1894,went to Chicago and New York City and left his mark that can never be erased from the annals of literature. He graduated here from Lewistown High school in 1886, and practised law here. However "Spoon River Anthology" lives on here in the 'valley of the 'unmythical' Spoon River! The book is real, the town is real, and the River is real! In 1925 Masters told in an article review on his "Genesis of Spoon River"....."If there was ever a town called Spoon River" IT IS Lewistown, Illinois!" Read the book, then visit the town in Central Illinois during the autumn Spoon River Scenic Drive Festival Days! Come See the real Spoon River, and see a part of what Masters saw! Human Nature - and nature itself!
Rating:
Summary: A nice stick-it-in-your-pocket edition of a classic
Review: Inspired by The Greek Anthology, a collection of brief poems from the Hellenistic World including epitaphs written from the perspective of the deceased, Edgar Lee Masters wrote a series of monologues spoken by dead townspeople (some more fictional than others) who inhabited Spoon River, the area in Illinois where Abe Lincoln once lived. Real people include Anne Rutledge (Abe's first girlfriend) and Fiddler Jones, who worked in Lincoln's general store as a boy.But this book isn't about Abraham Lincoln. It's about the trait that we will all, both saints and sinners, one day have in common: death. And it is about the small triumphs of life that the dead remember. Just as William Carlos Williams was a doctor, and his poetry was informed by his contact with everyday people, so too Masters. He was a lawyer and a keen observationist. He writes directly and frankly, especially about male-female relations, which earned this book a bit of a scandalous reputation in its time. Of course, it is mild enough today that the book is assigned reading in junior highs, even in the South. I've read this book three times through, and often re-read individual favorites. And I have it in easy reach on my shelf because I plan to keep re-reading it. There is something about the people of Spoon River and their sentiments that keeps me coming back. As May Swenson says, in her introduction to this edition, Masters "bequeathed to us a world in microcosm." A world, in my opinion, worth exploring again and again.
Rating:
Summary: Spoon River Anthology - If You Read No Other Book...
Review: Make Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters "the" one book to read before you leave this earth! This is the book you set by your bedside and "read" before you start your day and again read before you go to bed! It's the "Master" and without a doubt one of the best literatures I've ever read - A True Classic! Read this book; send one to your loved ones and a few to those that need simple philosophy in their lives! All ages need the words of Edgar Lee Masters... but above all, learn from these poems. It's one of the few books that I don't fall to sleep too!
Rating:
Summary: Spoon River Anthology - If You Read No Other Book...
Review: Make Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters "the" one book to read before you leave this earth! This is the book you set by your bedside and "read" before you start your day and again read before you go to bed! It's the "Master" and without a doubt one of the best literatures I've ever read - A True Classic! Read this book; send one to your loved ones and a few to those that need simple philosophy in their lives! All ages need the words of Edgar Lee Masters... but above all, learn from these poems. It's one of the few books that I don't fall to sleep too!
Rating:
Summary: This is the version to read, to buy, to own!
Review: Okay, okay, we know it's a true classic of American Literature, but why should you buy the Annotated Edition? Well, annotations, for one thing. The added layers of understanding are well worth the extra $. Plus, it's a really nice trade paperback. It just looks classier than some newsprinty mass market.
Rating: 
Summary: Like 200 spoons in a drawer
Review: Originally published in 1915 this anthology is a series of free verse monologues written from the perspective of the deceased inhabitants of Spoon River. Most of the monologues are from rather pathetic people who were either wronged by others or who wronged others. The book concludes with "The Spooniad" which gives something of a story summary of the events that you have been reading about from the perspective of the various characters.
My favourite part is comparing the monologues of the various parties involved in the disputes. This can be quite funny at times to see the irony of their lives from the perspective of death. The monologues are also quite philosophical at times and I conclude with
Griffy the Cooper
The cooper should know about tubs.
But I learned about life as well,
And you who loiter around these graves
Think you know life.
You think your eye sweeps about a wide horizon, perhaps,
In truth you are only looking around the interior of your tub.
You cannot lift yourself to its rim
And see the outer world of things,
And at the same time see yourself.
You are submerged in the tub of yourself-
Taboos and rules and appearances,
Are the staves of your tub.
Break them and dispel the witchcraft
Of thinking your tub is life!
And that you know life!
Rating:
Summary: If this does not depress you nothing will
Review: Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson , Thornton Wilder and Edgar Lee Masters all find in small- town Middle America the proof of Thoreau's ' the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation'. However Masters version of this is a particularly difficult and depressing one, as the frame device involves each character telling his story from the graveyard. There is no ' they all lived happily after' or no ' happy ending ' here. The bitterness, pain , failure frustration of many of these lives makes the whole work extremely for me anyway difficult to get through. Nonetheless there is a lot one can learn about small town Midwest American life, about its conflicts and passions from this volume. The poetry however as poetry is not at the highest level, the level where the language itself means more to us than any one reading can give. This seems to me in a certain way more valuable as a social document than as Literature.
Rating:
Summary: A Reminder that history is people.
Review: Spoon River Anthology is an American Classic. It has touched me since my grandfather read parts of it to me more than thirty years ago. Ostensibly it is a collection of autobiographical poems of the silent inhabitants of the town's graveyard. The broad theme, the book's strategy, is the great sweep of what America was like in the nineteenth century. The stories of their lives; joys and sorrows, successes and failures, loves and hates, and secrets of those people in the graveyard are the tactics. Above all, E.L. Masters exposes the hypocrisy and denial in which people have always lived their lives. Even today, in a much worldlier time than the turn of the century when it was written, the brutal honesty of the citizens shakes our complacency. This is no mellow reflection on the good old days. Its citizens corrupt and are corrupted. They suffer loveless marriages. Men run away to war to escape jail or rejection in love, women suffer stifling lack of opportunity and equality. The citizens die in childbirth or from lockjaw contracted from a cut by a rusty knife. Yet in reading about these lives we understand a little more about what it is to be human. None of us could fail to find some stories that in ways match ours to a greater or lesser extent. An in doing so, be granted in life the level of insight into ourselves and others that these storytellers achieved only after their lives had ended.
Rating:
Summary: A Classic of American Literature
Review: Spoon River Anthology is one of the books that everybody who loves literature ought to read. Even though the Editorial Board of the Modern Library didn't include it in their top 100 list, it belongs there. Like Our Town which came later, Spoon River Anthology captures the small town perspective and like Winesburg, Ohio (which did make the Modern Library list) it evokes another time and place which contain the roots of many of us today. This book is very rewarding.
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