nd Wrenn 50) parody. The suspicion is reinforced by certain classical allusions buried within the main text. For example, the given name of "Cassius Hueffer" is a deliberate and ironic annotation of Shakespeare's lean and hungry Cassius, who, in his jealousy of Caesar, plots the assassination in Julius Caesar. Masters's Cassius "made warfare on life, / In the which he was slain" (29), and he has carried his bitterness and tension with a small-town life of resentment into death as well.
As a work within a work, the Epilogue can also be interpreted as a Homeric simile in the shape of a Greek play, with the colored flames serving as a chorus that, perhaps unnecessarily, explains the multivaried sweep of lives or of Life Itself in the epitaphs: "Here is a blossom, here a twisted stalk, / Here fruit that sourly withers ere its prime; And here a growth that sprawls across the walk, / Food for the green worm, which it turns to slime" (Masters 308). The Epilogue contrasts with "The Hill," which opens Spoon River Anthology, where the poet simply recites a preliminary list of
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