Edgar Lee Masters

Elsa Wertman/ Hamilton Green

(August 23, 1868, Garnett, Kansas – March 5, 1950, Melrose Park, Pennsylvania) was an American poet, biographer, and dramatist.

Masters first published his early poems and essays under the pseudonym Dexter Wallace (after his mother's maiden name and his father's middle name) until the year 1903, when he joined the law firm of Clarence Darrow.

Masters began developing as a notable American poet in 1914, when he began a series of poems (this time under the pseudonym Webster Ford) about his childhood experiences in Western Illinois, which appeared in Reedy's Mirror, a St. Louis publication. In 1915 the series was bound into a volume and re-titled Spoon River Anthology. Years later, he wrote a memorable and invaluable account of the book’s background and genesis, his working methods and influences, as well as its reception by the critics, favorable and hostile, in an autobiographical article notable for its human warmth and general interest.^[4]

Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively describe the life of the fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town. The collection includes two hundred and twelve separate characters, all providing two-hundred forty-four accounts of their lives and losses. The poems were originally published in the magazine Reedy's Mirror.

Each following poem is an epitaph of a dead citizen, delivered by the dead themselves. They speak about the sorts of things one might expect: some recite their histories and turning points, others make observations of life from the outside, and petty ones complain of the treatment of their graves, while few tell how they really died. Speaking without reason to lie or fear the consequences, they construct a picture of life in their town that is shorn of façades.

Many of the characters that make appearances in Spoon River Anthologywere based on real people that Masters knew or heard of in the two towns in which he grew up, Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois.

Elsa Wertman

I WAS a peasant girl from Germany,

Blue-eyed, rosy, happy and strong.

And the first place I worked was at Thomas Greene’s.

On a summer’s day when she was away

He stole into the kitchen and took me

Right in his arms and kissed me on my throat,

I turning my head. Then neither of us

Seemed to know what happened.

And I cried for what would become of me.

And cried and cried as my secret began to show.

One day Mrs. Greene said she understood,

And would make no trouble for me,

And, being childless, would adopt it.

(He had given her a farm to be still.)

So she hid in the house and sent out rumors,

As if it were going to happen to her.

And all went well and the child was born—They were so kind to me.

Later I married Gus Wertman, and years passed.

But—at political rallies when sitters-by thought I was crying

At the eloquence of Hamilton Greene—

That was not it.

No! I wanted to say:

That’s my son! That’s my son!

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