Spoon River Anthology was written in 1915 by Edgar Lee Masters. The poems are written in first person by the dead speakers, who are buried in a cemetery called “the hill”.  The poems can be read as stand alone works, or as a collective with the references to other characters. The characters are lifelong friends and neighbors that continue their feelings for each other beyond the grave. We will take a further look into the attitude and philosophies of some of the characters.

Minerva Jones was the village poetess.  She hungered for a life where her work would be printed. She was not a beautiful woman and the townspeople hooted and mocked her. She was hunted down and raped by “Butch” Weldy.  She goes to Doctor Meyers for help to abort her pregnancy from the rape.  He helps her but then she dies from the procedure. Her last words “ I thirsted so for love I hungered so for life!”, which makes me feel as though she was a simple woman who just wanted to live a life she loved that was not afforded to her. It’s a case of being judged on the surface level where no one took what she had to say at any serious value. It makes you question if she would have been born some beautiful woman would the life she so hungered for been granted to her?

Doctor Meyers was the town doctor. The poem starts with him being adorned for all that he did for the town people. He was very fortunate, until the night he came to the aid of Minerva Jones out of the goodness of his heart. When she died that town turned their backs on him, mind you the same people he had healed, disgracing him. It shows the power of a crowd and how thought can become a chain reaction. The fact that he was trying to help a person the town mocked to begin with, then at her death they choose to pass judgement on the doctor.  Never once did the town people think of the role they too played in all of this.  If they would have supported Minerva in the first place would her life and the doctors had a different outcome? The anthology has a domino effect, showing how we are all in a sense connected. 

“Butch” Weldy is the character that reaps what he sows. I find it ironic that he cannot see “And I sat on the witness stand as blind as Jack the Fiddler, saying over and over,” He doesn’t see how his actions have affected so many lives. “The Circuit Judge said whoever did it Was a fellow-servant of mine, and so” showing that someone wanted him dead. 

Margaret Fuller Slack was an ambitious soul that wanted to become a famous writer. Her fate led her to be lured into becoming a  wife and mother, in which she states “and had no time to write.”  Her story is also ironic in that she dies from lock-jaw and was never allowed the chance to tell her story.  

Nellie Clark lives a life she can never escape where the past haunts her. She is raped at 8 years old with no justice to come from it. She goes on to later marry a stranger from town that doesn’t know her story and when he becomes aware of it states that he was cheated. “And the village agreed that I was not really a virgin.”  her whole life she is constantly deserted by the people that should have stood up for her. She was abandoned and alone. 

Abel Melveny shows that material possessions cannot buy happiness. “I bought every kind of machine that’s known-” He collected all these things, but never mentions sharing his life with anyone. “I saw myself as a good machine That LIfe had never used.” There is a theme of loneliness and isolation. He longs for a life he loves that he never receives. 

In the anthology we see a different side to this idea of community. Instead of being a loving supportive group of people you find it tells the story from the polar opposite side. The people are non supportive, and judgemental. They don’t push people to chase their dreams. There is a domino effect in how one person’s actions lead to the next person and so on. Even in death they are all connected by being buried together on “the hill.”

Masters, Edgar Lee. “100 Years of Spoon River Anthology.” Poetry Foundation, 22, April. 2015,

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/audio/76970/100-years-of-spoon-river-anthology

Masters, Edgar Lee. “Butch” Weldy.” The Norton Anthology of Literature,edited by Robert S. Levine, Norton, 2022, p 30.
Master, Edgar Lee. “Margaret Fuller Slack.” The Norton Anthology of Literature, edited by Robert S. Levine, Norton, 2022, p 31.a