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Edgar Lee Masters
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I lived from 1869-1950.
I was from America, and am in the Americas category.
I influenced poet Sterling A Brown.
Edgar Lee Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas in 1869. A few years later, when Edgar was 11 years old his family settled at Lewiston, Illinois, near Spoon River, where Masters spent his childhood on his grandfather’s farm. Both Lewiston and Petersburg became models for the scene of his poems in Spoon River Anthology. Masters’s father was a lawyer and would not support his son’s literary aspirations. In attempting to follow in his fathers footsteps he attended Knox College, and was admitted to the bar in 1891. He settled in Chicago where he worked as a lawyer for nearly 30 years. While in Chicago he met Helen M. Jenkins who was the daughter of a Chicago lawyer and she was to become Masters’s first wife. Due to an overload of work and stress he contracted Pneumonia. Controversy surrounding the revealing poems about bigotry and liaisons in Spoon River caused a decrease in his clients. Masters retired and devoted himself to writing.
After resigning from Clarence Darrow’s law firm he established his own firm and traveled to Europe. During that time he continued to write and made friends with Harriet Monroe who was the editor of the Poetry magazine. He also befriended fellow poets, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and other members of the acclaimed Chicago Group. This union meant a lot to Masters, who had spent most of his life in a bitter void due to the scornful attitude in Lewiston for his writing.
Read full description by Tina Old Poetry team...
In 1898 Masters made his debut with A BOOK OF VERSES. MAXIMILIAN followed soon after in 1902. His work thereafter, THE NEW STAR CHAMBER (1904) a drama written in blank verse, BLOOD OF THE PROPHETS (1905) which was a collection of essays, and two plays ALTHEA (1907) and THE BREAD OF IDLENESS (1911)
Masters was introduced to Epigrams from the Greek Anthology in 1909, by Marion Reedy, editor of Reedy’s Mirror of St. Louis. This fueled inspiration for Master’s most famous work, Spoon River Anthology. Spoon River is realistic and often cynical epitaphs narrated by 250 people buried in the graveyard of a village in the Middle East. “You will die, nodoubt, but die while living In depths of azure, rapt and mated, Kissing the queen-bee, Life!" His mother inspired the original idea and discussed with him the people they used to know in the village. The work was first printed anonymously in Reedy’s Mirror in 1914 and 1915. It then went to publication in book form, again anonymously. The sequel, The New Spoon River, appeared in 1924, but it was not as popular as the first.Spoon River was Masters’s way to gain revenge on narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy. Although it gained vast popularity it destroyed his position as a respectable member of establishment.
In 1921 Masters left his family and fled to Europe after his wife denied him a divorce. Since the peak of the Chicago renaissance had passed, Masters considered it impossible to return to his home town. Finally his wife granted him a divorce and he went to New York where he remarried. His new wife, Ellen Coyne Masters, was much younger and the daughter of an Irish immigrant. Ellen Masters pursued her career as a teacher while her husband retired to the Chelsea Hotel to devote his time to writing. The hotel was an attraction to writers such as Thomas Wolfe, Arthur Miller, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Arthur C. Clarke, and Allen Ginsburg.
Other than poems, Master’s published biographies of Vachel Lindsay, whom he had befriend and fellow poet Mark Twain whom he depicted as a frustrated genius, and Walt Whitman. One of his later books that gained wide attention was his sharply analytical study of the Civil War president Abraham Lincoln (1931). Across Spoon River , Masters’s autobiography, was published in 1939.
“Sometimes, I would see him read one of his own poems or pieces of prose over and over, as if to discover how they had been written.” (Hilary Masters on his father in Last Stands , 1982).
Masters proceeded to produce volumes of verse almost yearly but the quality of his writing never reached the level of his masterpiece.
His last years were spent in solitude in a small hotel in New York. He died in Philadelphia on March 5, 1950. In 1982, Hilary Masters, son from his second marriage, published a portrait of his father under the title Last Stands.
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