en unresolved and become more deeply embittered in death:
In Spoon River, Masters borrowed the mouths of the dead to give outlet to all his grudges, beliefs, indignations, insights, prophesies discoveries of glaring injustice, revelations of life's mysteries and paradoxes--and his own eccentric philosophy (Swenson 13).
Both Spoon River Anthology (first edition published 1915) and Winesburg, Ohio (published 1919) were produced in the context of the so-called Chicago Renaissance of 1910-1920 (White 3ff), by men of some experience and well into middle age. What makes this fact significant for the present research is that these works are literary products putatively of the American prairie province experience but not from it. A certain ambivalence of attitude and a studied attempt to have a critical perspective on provincial life can be deduced from both the shape that each work takes and at least some of the content of each.
Spoon River Anthology, a record of a sleepy little prairie village, would doubtless be opaque as literature to most of the inhabitants of the village. Though mainly iambic in meter, Spoon River Anthology is unconventional in versification, with its mostly unrhymed lines and epitaphs of varying lengths. The work is also self-consciously allusive of classical poetry, myth, and allegory even as it evokes the psychological realities of prairie-town life. The segment titled "The Spooniad" can be interpreted as Masters's poetic declaration of nothing less than classically epic intent for Spoon River Anthology, an intent scarcely concealed by Masters's attribution of the verse to one Jonathan Swift Somers of Spoon River.
Hollander (48) calls "The Spooniad" a "broadly Miltonic parody," but the very fact that the poem fragment, trivial verse as it is (Wrenn and Wrenn 46), closes Spoon River Anthology means that it is difficult not to suspect that Masters might not have originally intended it as mock-heroic (Wrenn a...