Spoon River Anthology is a collection of short free form poems. It is an extremely weird collection because each of the poems except the first one which serves as an introduction is what is called an epitaph of a dead person, and it is delivered by the dead person him or herself. They make observations and talk about their thoughts of life from an outside point of view and some just talk about their life and when their life took a turning point. It is an extremely odd collection. It is said that a major inspiration for the Anthology of Spoon River was epigrams from Greek Anthology(Becker). This Spoon River Anthology was inspired by earlier time periods of anthology but I am sure that it was tweeked a little bit and does not have all the same characteristics. A successful Chicago lawyer, named Masters, wrote a lot of Spoon River Anthology during the weekends and stuff(Becker). This collection relates to realism because it uses mysterious things. Also, they have some talk of afterlife which might be a contradiction to previous literary periods where god was everything. If god was everything you would just go right up to heaven and there would never be no such talk as things of after life and what not. However, I think that both Emerson and Thoreau were smarter than to just go with the flow without back up info and maybe that would contridict things like just going straight to heaven. It is very interesting that this man was from Illinois, it makes me like him a lot more because he was from Illinois. He was actually from the area that my dad was from, Havana, Illinois. However, these stories were still odd because they were about that of an afterlife(Masters). This collection of poems is very different from all of the stories and works that we have read before because it talks a lot about death and weird things as where the other stories talked about normal things like love, but some others were about death but they were not dead people talking to you because that is odd.
Becker, Geraldine Cannon. "Spoon River Anthology." In Anderson, George P., Judith S. Baughman, Matthew J. Bruccoli, and Carl Rollyson, eds. Encyclopedia of American Literature, Revised Edition: Into the Modern: 1896–1945, Volume 3. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2008. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= EAmL1405&SingleRecord=True (accessed March 2, 2012).
Masters, Edgar Lee. Spoon River Anthology. New York, 1951. Print.
good discussion
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