Il nuovo Spoon River

by Edgar Lee Masters, Barbara Lanati (Contributor), Umberto Capra (Translator)

Oltre trecento personaggi raccontano la storia infelice della loro vita e comunicano il proprio testamento spirituale: "The New Spoon River", pubblicato da Masters nove anni dopo la famosa "Spoon River Anthology", appare oggi un classico della poesia di ogni tempo e paese. La poesia dei morti di Spoon River è, in ultima analisi, un moderno poema dantesco, una "divina commedia" rivisitata attraverso lo sguardo e la voce non di una "persona" singola ma di un centinaio di "peccatori" anonimi che, con la pubblica confessione, si danno finalmente "il" nome che non era stato loro riconosciuto in vita.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Classics, Americana, American

333 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1979

About the author

Edgar Lee Masters (Garnett, Kansas, August 23, 1868 - Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, March 5, 1950) was an American poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait, Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems. In all, Masters published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman.

Reviews

[Googoogjoob · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is Edgar Lee Masters's attempt, a decade or so later, to recreate the format (and the success) of his only real masterpiece, the Spoon River Anthology. The idea of "more Spoon River" is inevitably alluring to anyone who's read and loved the Anthology, and here Masters tries to give the people what they want. He fails, and worse, doesn't quite seem to get what made the SRA work in the first place.

Spoon River Anthology is a series of 246 poems, all but three of them in the form of brief monologues by the shades of the dead buried on a hill in the Illinois town of Spoon River. Few of the poems are noteworthy in their own right; rather, the effect and reputation of the work rest on the way the poems interact. They contradict each other, offer different perspectives on the same people, events, or ideas, they gossip. They give, generally, the impression of the life of a community over a century or so, from frontier town to late-19th century backwater.

The New Spoon River attempts to replicate this format, and to serve as a continuation of SRA, bringing things up to date (meaning the early 1920s), and to depict Spoon River's transformation from a small town into a satellite of Chicago. It does not work, for several reasons.

The biggest and most notable reason is that the poems simply no longer comment on each other in the same way they did in SRA. Masters identified 19 discrete narrative arcs embedded in the poems of SRA, where sequences of poems built up a composite story between them, and many poems that aren't part of these arcs also provide glancing commentary on the characters in them. TNSR doesn't even really try for many such arcs. There are only eight sequences like that in TNSR, and only the triptych of the Snivelys (Selden, Howard, and Ernest) goes any further than "a pair of poems commenting on each other" or "one poem commenting on another." Four poems early on comment on local big man Ezra Fink, but where the shadow of crooked banker Thomas Rhodes hangs over SRA, Ezra Fink is negligible, and not mentioned at all after the 24th poem.

Perhaps this disconnection is meant to show that Spoon River has grown and diversified, and is no longer a tightly-knit small town- but that just goes to show that this format doesn't work as well when taken from that tight-knit original context. Insofar as this book uses the multiple-perspective technique, it mostly uses it to provide multiple perspectives on American society as a whole, rather than on individual characters and dramas- and it just doesn't work as well for that purpose. Where Masters could draw on real-life gossip and town lore for SRA (many poems treat real events with the names changed slightly), he can't do that here, further contributing to its feeling of atomization. His attempts at treating urban alienation and disillusionment, or the immigrant experience, are not as convincing as his depictions of wasted lives and stifled dreams in SRA.

The collection's feeble interconnectedness is also overshadowed by Masters's clumsy attempts to link this book with the original SRA. By my count, there are 24 references by these poems to other poems in the book- spread out over 329 poems, that's an average of .07 references per poem. But there are 82 references to poems in Spoon River Anthology (not counting references to characters, like Burchard the saloon-keeper, without their own poems)- .25 per poem. (For comparison, SRA has 228, for a rate of .93 internal cross-references per poem.)

The references to SRA characters in TNSR are usually clunky, and none of them really offer vital new information. Many of the references are offhand and superficial- eg the mention in "Percy Cowherd" of Roscoe Purkapile. In the poem "Maurice Schlichter," Masters embarrassingly bungles his reference- he mentions Eugene Carman, but the referred-to story (a man throwing himself on Rhodes's mercy) is clearly that of Clarence Fawcett, whose poem follows Carman's in SRA. A poem like "Hofflund the Cobbler," which gratuitously describes the feet of 12 characters from SRA in implicit contrast to their characters, could've passed muster as a lesser, but forgivable, entry in SRA. Here it sticks out awkwardly, and highlights just how little the poems in this volume relate to each other. "Leander Morphy" similarly rattles off a list of seven SRA characters before ending in (unintentionally?) hilarious bathos.

Eight different poems in TNSR mention Lucius Atherton, a (rather pathetic) ladies' man from SRA (and one other character might be intended as his child, or at least named after him), making him, for whatever reason, the most-mentioned character in this book, other than Jesus (name-dropped 17 times total). The town-defining banker Thomas Rhodes only gets mentioned six times, while the spineless newspaper editor Whedon is mentioned five times, and cruel mayor A. D. Blood four.

The sequencing of the poems also feels haphazard- in conjunction with the book's lack of interrelatedness, there are few related adjacent poems; the scarcity of married couples or parents and children in sequence means that the volume feels less like wandering through a small graveyard with family plots, and more like a random sampling of a huge cemetery.

The poems are frankly not as good, generally, as in SRA, either. Masters resorts too often to Climactic final lines!, and it feels like he struggles to treat the more impersonal social/political forces of his increasingly urbanized setting with the depth he treated the small town Spoon River was. Even his selection of characters' names is weaker, lacking the poetry of SRA.

There are too many poems. SRA originally had 213, expanded to 246; TNSR has 329 (some bundled into multi-character sequences). Unlike SRA, Masters doesn't try for a grand poetic gesture to close the volume- which is probably for the best, considering how "Epilogue" turned out. Unfortunately, though, he instead chooses to end the volume with "Cleanthus Trilling," a rather trite poem that echoes "Mrs. Sibley" from SRA, but without the pathos. ("Mrs. Sibley" features a series of lines in the format "The secret of...," eg "The secret of the seed—the germ," and climaxes with the suggestive imagery that her own secret is buried beneath a "mound." "Cleanthus Trilling" is a series of lines in the format "The urge of...," starting with "The urge of the seed: the germ," and ends with the bland "The urge of Pain: God.")

So- this is not the worst volume of poems ever assembled. Some of them are pretty decent in isolation. The problem is that Masters deliberately set the book up as a continuation of Spoon River Anthology, and simply failed to live up to the standard he had set a decade earlier. It's not possible to judge it purely on its own merits- in its format, themes, and explicit content it constantly calls SRA to mind, and is found wanting.

As a footnote: for some arcane reason, Goodreads lists this book, The New Spoon River, as an edition of a much later Italian volume, which apparently contains translations of both Spoon River Anthology and The New Spoon River. One has to assume that most of the ratings (which are on average very good) are the result of Italian readers evaluating the first book.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't know this book existed, saw it in a bookstore, and bought it on sight. Enjoyed it as much as the first one - a little more pessimistic in tone overall - but the epigram format is still just as engaging and enjoyable. Really original format and insightful reflections within each poem.

These were my favorites from this volume:
Edith Bell
Zorbaugh Zwenen
Ella Snook, the Postmistress
Mrs. Gard Waful (Degeneration)

Watson Stelinger
"And you hired for critics of art and books
Venomous women and envious men,
Who soiled the truth and tortured beauty,
To please themselves and you!"

Levy Silver
Henry Zoll the Miller
The Seese Lot
Marshall Carpenter
Hughes Robinson
Walter Britt

Righter Selden
"Of what use is it to be on the point
Of coming to great wisdom through suffering,
And then to dull your vision,
And lose the wisdom
By easing your suffering
Through some anaesthetic,
Whether it be alcohol, or Christian Science?
You who do this sell all you have,
And then fail to buy the pearl."

Wallace Hardy
Emma Serviss
Amy Whedon
Angela Sanger
Robert Chain

Dulany Levering
"Did you carry the cross of Jesus,
And whine about your own?"

Emilius Poole
James Istel
Philip Dever
Henry Ditch
Eleanor Powell
Aristotle Dolegg
Job Howes
Conrad Herron
Marcus Jarissen

Nathan Kost
"... Rebellion:
... resistance
Of those who wish to rule you,
And still make you bear the mistakes of that rule;
Forbidding to you to bear the mistakes of ruling yourself."

Burton Fairman
Elza Ramsey
Genevieve daughter Faulkner
Orson Warwick
Nathan Suffrin

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Partendo dal presupposto che questi nuovi poemi non arrivano alla magnificenza della classica Antologia di Spoon River, devo dire che è stata una lettura molto piacevole. Gli epitaffi sono più caustici e intrisi di politica e religione, rispecchiano benissimo il periodo in cui sono stati scritti. I personaggi sembrano più disperati dei precedenti, come se l'avanzare delle epoche li avesse induriti e spogliati da qualsiasi gioia. Ci sono tematiche interessanti celate da simboli e da un ottimo utilizzo del lessico. Ho apprezzato l'epitaffio sulla poligamia, la bisessualità e quelle sul sessismo intrise dal falso perbenismo.

[Terri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I fell in love with Spoon River as a high school junior. I have read Edgar Lee Masters iconic poetry many times, but only recently ran across a copy of this sequel to the original anthology. This excellent volume picks up where the first left off, the late 1860s, and shares brief biographical poems for Spoon River citizens who died in that roughly 60-year span from about 1870 through the a Roaring Twenties. As in the original, the dead share their cogent, often cynical, hindsight into the beauty, pain, and injustice hidden in the lives of small town America.

[Silvia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3+

Recensione completa qui: http://tinyfoxinthebox.blogspot.com/2...

Pur non essendo un'amante dei classici, questo libro non mi è dispiaciuto.
Una raccolta di epitaffi in chiave poetica molto interessante, che offre un discreto spaccato della vita di paese nel Midwest dell'epoca e che tratta diversi temi davvero importanti.
Verso la metà, personalmente, ho cominciato a trovare il tutto un po' noioso e lento, ma comunque è stata una buona lettura.

[Elisabetta · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un'entrata inutile nel panorama creto da Masters che era l'immaginifica città di Spoon River. Il potenziale per approfondire, esaminare e vedere sotto nuova luce il progresso e la globalizzazzione, l'urbanizzazzione delle cittadine Americane, perso- svanito nella ripetitività, il oltre 300 pagine di abitanti di quello che è divenuto il sobborgo della grande città, dove le donne ingannano o rinunciano, arroganti, alla famiglia per la carriera, e gli uomini desiderano solo denaro e non avere Dio.

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't as good as Master's first Spoon River works. This selection doesn't have the small town connections that make the anthology so fun to read. However, it does add to the first because several well known characters from the first selection are mentioned in this works, so it is a continuation of sorts.

[MisterFweem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review is here, including my attempt at a modern Spoon Riveresque epitaph.

http://www.misterfweem.blogspot.com/2...

[Barbara Ab · Rating 2 out of 5]

I understand the high level of poetry writing and the genius behind it, but I don’t appreciate anymore poetry in this stage of my life… I read no more of half of it…