Research Paper on:
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
that the combined testimonies portray all of the sordid intrigues, hypocrisies, and monotony of small time life (Anonymous PG). This poetic discourse from the graveyard of Spoon River undercuts every  pedantic lesson as it questions various moral and civic aspects of American life (Timoneda 45). The cross-section that Masters presents, particularly in the first half of the book, is  essential bleak. There are quite a few suicides, murder victims, as well as instances of fraud, injustice, religious subjugation, and spiritual death as Masters presents a "procession of malefactors, victims,  and wretches" (Hollander 49). However, things improve?somewhat? as the book progresses. The epitaphs of the "fools, the drunkards, and the failures" are  first with the monologues of the "heroes and the enlightened spirits" coming at the end of the book (Hollander 49). In between the two are the souls that Masters called  the "people of the one-birth minds" (Hollander 49). Essentially, beginning around the middle of the anthology, Masters begins to portray the concerns that focus on relationships and the intimate  life of the community, and how lifes meaning has been expressed in individual lives. The student researching this topic can take note that while it is possible to sum  up each of these poems with a single sentence, to cover even half the book would entail over a hundred such sentence descriptions, without showing their significance to one another.  However, the poems analyzed below are representative of those dominating the last half of the book. For example, "Hortense Robbins" deals with the banality of a life that was  lived for superficial and shallow purposes. Hortense states that while she lived "My name used to be in the papers daily" (166). The news accounts told of where she dined