SOURCE: “Revolt from the Grave: Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters,” in Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought, Vol. 29, No. 4, Summer, 1988, pp. 438-47.

In the following essay, Chandran argues that Spoon River can be interpreted as a repudiation of the small-town myth.

they made my pleasant field a desolate wilderness. …

Jeremiah 12:10

On its first appearance, Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology (1915) inaugurated a convention of graveyard realism not so much shocking as disconcerting in its assumptions. The poet seemed to insist that the dead do communicate with fierce passion; that they being dead, could tell the living with grave candor life's follies and man's foibles; that they could stab at truth and still be blameless. To many readers of the Anthology, the paradox seemed a little unpleasant: the dead confront the living; the mute past speaks to the vocal present.

The singularity of Masters's achievement is...