Spoon River Anthology
Tuesday, December 11th by carlaI wanted my American Lit students to understand the mindset of American writers in the years just prior to World War I. I asked them to work in small groups and find some related poems in the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. They were to decide how the poems connected, then memorize and present them. I also required simple props of some kind.
The activity went well, although there was some “discussion” about having to memorize poems. After seeing all of the presentations, students grasped the bleakness that pervaded the zeitgeist, and they carried that understanding with them as we read T. S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Spoon River Anthology: the definitive online edition presents the poetry for future readers. From the site:
Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology was an immediate commercial success when it was published in 1915. Unconventional in both style and content, it shattered the myths of small town American life. A collection of epitaphs of residents of a small town, a full understanding of Spoon River requires the reader to piece together narratives from fragments contained in individual poems.
Here’s one of my favorites:
“Fiddler Jones”
THE earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands
For beeves hereafter ready for market;
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”
How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill–only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle–
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.
Special thanks to David Dillard and the Net-Gold list for this heads-up!
December 11th, 2007 at 7:08 am
I love the Spoon River Anthology! I used it in an 8th grade drama class last year. Each student was assigned a character from the anthology and had to design a costume and make a tombstone for that character. It was amazing to see how much they understood and how their characters’ personalities were reflected in the tombstones.
October 6th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Can someone explain to me why this book is banned? Last year, I was required to dress in costume and design a tombstone for my chosen character and recite the memorized poem. I learned today that it was banned and I just don’t understand why?
October 7th, 2008 at 4:16 am
Kayla, you’d need to ask someone in your district for the rationale behind banning the book. I can only guess that someone objected to the fact that the book deals obliquely with issues like rape and abortion.