Edgar Lee Masters

I had never heard of the minor American poet Edgar Lee Masters, but he seems to be, if not a naturalist, someone who is interesting in terms of naturalism, which I did not much expect to find in poetry. The Norton Anth of Am Lit describes his most important work, Spoon River Anthology, in terms that sound very much like Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or Garland's Main-Traveled Roads: the dead speakers of interrelated poems in the anthology "continue their loves and quarrels beyond the grave. Their dissonant voices converge in a lament for suppressed and wasted lives, only rarely varied by joy or gusto. Sex has driven them, but given little pleasure. They long for the sympathy that they withhold from each other. Yet the poems as a group are compassionate, not judgmental" (1101). Save for that last line, that sounds like a perfectly naturalist description. And individual poems also seem to take up naturalist points.

Serepta Mason believes that she could have flowered in life, but a "bitter wind" prevented her from. Like Maggie, her environment prevented her growth. "Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed/Who do not know the ways of the wind/And the unseen forces/That govern the processes of life." This sounds like a perfectly naturalistic account of the complex social forces that prevent the seed of humanity from flowering.

Trainor, the Druggist notes that, like chemicals, people's offspring are the unpredictable outcome of contending forces. "There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife,/Good in themselves, but evil towards each other:/He oxygen, she hydrogen, /Their son, a devastating fire." In this poem, people are just chemical elements, and their offspring are the product of a chemical reaction. That's not far from a naturalist theory of offspring and racial stock.

Margaret Fuller Slack's poem is a feminist lament; she could have been another George Eliot "But for an untoward fate." The poem ends with a pun; after marrying the druggist (seemingly not Trainor) who promised her leisure time to write a novel, Mrs. Slack bears 8 children and dies of lockjaw after piercing herself with a needle while washing for a baby. She concludes "Sex is the curse of life!" Both sex (as her gender) and sex (as the force that engendered her children) locked her into her fate.

Abel Melveny's situation doesn't make too much sense; he hoarded "every kind of machine that's known" but, with no use for most of them and no shed to store them in, had to watch them "Getting rusted, warped, and battered." After noting that he never used a fine machine, he concludes "I saw myself as a good machine/That Life had never used." Abel, like his tools, was an automaton, who, due to the hand of fate, never saw use.

Lucinda Matlock has the only really positive poem; her life is a catalog of pleasure taking and joyous events, save for the fact that she lost 8 of her 12 children. But she takes a naturalist stance towards those that she sees not enjoying life around her: "What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness/Anger, discontent, and drooping hopes?/Degenerate sons and daughters,/Life is too strong for you -/It takes life to love life." Lucinda here, I think, is referencing the reservoir; only by bringing energy to life can one make something of life. This, like the difference between Clyde Griffiths and his cousin, makes all the difference: strong drives can bring pleasure, the lack of drives results in degeneration.