Quote of the Day (Edgar Lee Masters, on Media That “Glory in Demoniac Power”)

“To scratch dirt over scandal for money,
And exhume it to the winds for revenge,
Or to sell papers,
Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be,
To win at any cost, save your own life.
To glory in demoniac power, ditching civilization,
As a paranoiac boy puts a log on the track
And derails the express train.
To be an editor, as I was.
Then to lie here close by the river over the place
Where the sewage flows from the village,
And the empty cans and garbage are dumped,
And abortions are hidden.”—Edgar Lee Masters, “Editor Whedon,” in Spoon River Anthology (1915)

Last year, I missed the chance to write about the 95th anniversary of the classic by Edgar Lee Masters. Then, last weekend, I came across this New York Times article about an adaptation of the book mounted in, of all places, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, running through Sunday, June 26. The opportunity to write about one of the great narrative poems was too good for me to pass up.

Together with contemporaries Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, Masters—a Midwestern law partner of Clarence Darrow who eventually took up the literary life—wrote about an America still well within the small-town/rural tradition. All three poets often wrote the kind of dramatic monologues that Robert Browning had made his own particular province.

The major difference among the trio is that Robinson’s and Frost’s work in this form was more diffuse—and their achievements more extended—whereas Master’s was concentrated like a hard diamond into the 246 free-form poems that made Spoon River Anthology, in effect, a novel in verse, a portrait of a community collectively liberated by death to reveal what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.”

This particular poem is among the most savage of the entire collection. We learn from other poems here that Whedon has conspired with the town’s richest man to ruin opponents of their schemes. As the now-dead editor addresses the reader, he narrates his sins with the same note of objectivity as a journalist is supposed to have. There’s a quiet hint of irony in the line, “To win at any cost, save your own life.” He also acknowledges his irresponsible stewardship of his paper with the metaphor of the boy derailing the train.

But it’s in the last few lines that the poem picks up its awesome power. Whedon has to come to grips with more than just the fact that his work is infinitely perishable. He also understands that his physical remains, like the scandalmongering campaigns he conducted in life, belong now, quite literally, with the garbage, the detritus of a life better forgotten. That last line—“And abortions are hidden”—hints both at the kind of secret he didn’t mind exposing in his paper and the sense of shame that will now afflict him through eternity.

To me, part of the savagery of this poem derives from its small-town setting. For much of the 20th (and 21st century), “to scratch dirt over scandal for money” has been heavily associated with big cities and their institutions, where mass media hold the potential for mass profits and mass damage.

But Masters, like Robinson (and, in fiction within less than a half-dozen years, Sinclair Lewis) locates this desire to destroy even in the most micro of settings. It doesn’t take the corrupt promise of mass media to help surface this latent instinct. It lies in the Midwest of Abraham Lincoln (whose early love, Ann Rutledge, is among the voices of the dead), even in the dream of the uncorrupted provincial life cherished by Thomas Jefferson. Most disturbingly, Masters suggests, it lies at the heart of our American Eden.