Blog 13

Spoon River Anthology is a story written by Edgar Lee Masters. It is a collection of poems written as epitaphs for all the people living in a small town called Spoon River. This book was very interesting because since it was about a small town, it had a lot of gossip about people in it and you could trace the gossip and read what everybody thought of each other. I read one about a man named Harold Arnett. Harold was a man who was living in Spoon River. He was very unhappy and he wrote his poem about his suicide. He describes his wife yelling at him for burning some potatoes and then he shoots himself.  I thought that him killing himself over that was a little crazy. After he shoots himself, I think that he regrets it. He says that it is “too late” and he cannot go back. He also says “Of what use is it to rid one’s self of the world, When no soul may ever escape the eternal destiny of life?”  (Masters).This makes me think that Harold regrets committing suicide. Another poem that I read was one about Archibald Higbie. Higbie hated the town Spoon River. I think that he traveled a lot and he was the kind of person who would rather live in a large town full of people and a lot of culture. He says that he “loathed” Spoon River and he liked when he would go far away to places like Rome, Italy, and France because they made him forget about the small town that he came from. I think that Higbie probably did not fit in very well in Spoon River. He probably looked down on the people there because they did not value culture like he did. 

I think that the kind of small gossipy town that Edgar Lee Masters wrote about is the kind of thing that Thoreau and Emerson were trying to escape when they left society and lived in the woods. I think that is how this story relates to Emerson and Thoreau.

Bibliography

 

Masters, Edgar L. "Masters, Edgar Lee. 1916. Spoon River Anthology." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online. Bartleby. Web. 06 Mar. 2012.