SOURCE: “Spoon River: Politics and Poetry,” in Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics, Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer, 1987, pp. 347-63.

In the following essay, Burgess examines politics in small-town America as a central theme in Spoon River.

On the evening of 19 July 1892, nearing his twenty-fourth birthday, Edgar Lee Masters left Lewistown, Illinois, for Chicago, first riding the “Narrow Gauge” railway along the Spoon River valley. His autobiographical writings describe his growing malaise, a sense of “sinking deeper and deeper into weariness and ineffectual striving” in the Fulton County seat village of 2,500.¹

At the time of his departure, he was frustrated by family contentions, his own inability to make a living except as an assistant to his lawyer father, and vexing romantic attachments. The satchel he carried contained poetry manuscripts.² It is fortunate that they did not yield an “artist as young man” version of Spoon...