Remarks by Edgar Lee Masters | V2Melody Quotations

“There were fifty-three poems with names drawn from the Petersburg, New Salem, Concord, Sandridge country, and sixty-six from the Spoon River country.”

Provides Masters's own account of how extensively the anthology drew on the geography of his youth · The Genesis of Spoon River

“I wanted to awaken that American vision, that love of liberty which the best men of the Republic strove to win for us, and to bequeath to time.”

States the civic and patriotic purpose he associated with his most famous work · The Genesis of Spoon River

“My heart is with the prairies.”

Expresses his enduring emotional allegiance to the Midwestern landscape · Letter to August Derleth, 1938

“A titanic dedication to the hope of uplifting the human race.”

Describes the moral and humanistic force Masters found in ancient Greek literature · Critical writing on Aeschylus

“America's greatest lyric poet.”

Masters's striking assessment of Vachel Lindsay's achievement as a lyric poet · Whitman-era literary criticism

“The passion of my life to which philosophy and science and history have been but handmaidens.”

Describes poetry as the central intellectual and imaginative passion of his life · Across Spoon River

“In the poetry of fancy and of the imagination, there is poetry that lulls and lifts, and soothes with music and pictures.”

Distinguishes imaginative and musical poetry from the more demanding poetry he regarded as greatest · Across Spoon River

“He spoke for sensuality, not the life of wayward and hedonistic indulgence, but for man's and woman's spirit playing through the body and thereby ministering to the spirit and finding itself.”

Presents physical love as capable of expressing and deepening spiritual experience · Whitman

“Whitman fought for the modern point of view which has discarded chastity as the perverted ideal of Asiatic mysticism.”

Shows Masters's admiration for Whitman's challenge to inherited conventions surrounding the body and sexuality · Whitman

“What had enthralled me with Whitman was his conception of America as the field of a new art and music in which the people would be celebrated instead of kings.”

Reveals the democratic ideal that strongly shaped Masters's literary imagination · Across Spoon River

“I was trapped in a business which destroyed every imaginative impulse, and took all my strength and all my time.”

Expresses the frustration he felt when professional obligations suppressed his creative life · Across Spoon River

“The law and literature were oil and water.”

Captures the conflict he experienced between his legal profession and his literary ambitions · Across Spoon River

“It was you who pressed upon my attention in June, 1909, the Greek Anthology. It was from contemplation of its epitaphs that my hand unconsciously strayed to the sketches of The Spoon River Anthology.”

Acknowledges the Greek Anthology as a crucial inspiration for his most famous work · Letter to William Marion Reedy

“I loved the people there then and I love their memory.”

Shows the lasting affection with which Masters remembered the people of his youth · The Sangamon

“Southern Illinois holds a magical appeal to me quite beyond my power to describe.”

Conveys the enduring emotional and imaginative hold of his Midwestern home · The Sangamon

“The people there were hospitable, warm-hearted and generous beyond any people I have known, and full of the will to live.”

Expresses deep affection for the people and culture of the Illinois countryside of his youth · The Sangamon

“Poems in my Spoon River books about faithful and loving hearts, about kind and generous and hopeful people.”

Highlights the compassionate and hopeful dimension of his work often overshadowed by its darker reputation · Letter to August Derleth, 1939

“I have stood for that side of man which hopes and toils in spite of the biting insects that infest this bank and shoal of time.”

Affirms his sympathy with human perseverance despite the irritations and hardships of life · Letter to August Derleth, 1939

“I have written much beside the Spoon Rivers.”

Rejects the idea that his literary identity should be confined to his famous anthology · Letter to August Derleth, 1939

“It is the poetry which proves the laws of the spirit of man.”

Sees poetry as a way of revealing fundamental truths about human nature · Across Spoon River

“The greatest poetry is that which founds itself upon the truth which is the beautiful, and the beautiful which is the truth.”

Sets truth and beauty at the centre of his conception of great poetry · Across Spoon River

“She knew that poetry is thought and feeling, imagery and music rather than rhyme and meter.”

Defines poetry by its imaginative and emotional substance rather than by formal rules · Across Spoon River

“Poetry must come out of the earth.”

Expresses Masters's belief that genuine poetry should grow from lived experience and the life of a people · Whitman

“The liberty of Jefferson should be sung until it permeated the entire popular heart.”

Connects poetry with the preservation and dissemination of political liberty · Across Spoon River

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