Edgar Lee Masters
Spoon River Anthology, published by Macmillan.
After Whitman and Poe, Mr. Masters is by far the most original and interesting of American poets.
There is something Chaucerian about the quizzical and whimsical manner in which he tells his brief and homely stories. His characters are penetrated with the bleak and yet cheerful tone of the " Middle West." Something quaint, humorous and astringent emerges as their dominant note. Mr. Masters has the massive ironical observation and the shrewd humane wit of the great English novelists of the eighteenth century. His dead people reveal "the true truth" of their sordid and troubled lives. The little chances, the unguessed-at accidents, the undeserved blows of a capricious destiny, which batter so many of us into helpless inertness, are the aspects of life which interest him most.