Although Masters wrote plenty of verse in meter and rhyme, the poet of Spoon River made the American reading public aware of free verse as no 20th-century poet had yet managed to do. Russell comments in his sympathetic, balanced, judicious, authoritative, and readable biography, “It is this poem that people were most likely to read during Masters’s lifetime, and it will no doubt remain popular.” Faced with one of the best-known poems from Masters’s most popular book, a 21st-century reader can appraise, whether on first reading or rereading, the achievement of his distinctive style and the qualities of his deathless music. On Rutledge’s large gravestone the Petersburg, Illinois, municipal authorities had all 12 lines of Masters’s epitaph inscribed in 1921. Only one poem, “Anne Rutledge,” contributes two different quotations, the first consisting of two lines that open this famous twelve-line epitaph (“Out of me unworthy and unknown / The vibrations of deathless music”) and the second bearing the annunciation at the core of Rutledge’s posthumous monologue: “I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, / Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln.” If I were editing the next edition of Bartlett’s and did not have to worry about space, I would include the following two lines as well: “Wedded to him, not through union, / But through separation.”Īs it turns out, Masters’s own grave-he died in 1950 at the age of 81-lies a mere 40 paces from that of Ann Rutledge, to whose first name Masters added the e.

Turn to the Edgar Lee Masters entry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (I happen to be looking at the 14th edition, published in 1968, the centennial anniversary of Masters’s birth), and you will find brief quotations from five poems that originally appeared in the poet’s most famous work, Spoon River Anthology (1915).

Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography, By Herbert K.

Spoon river poems