Miniver scorned the gold he sought, Miniver Cheevy, born too late, Scratched his head and kept on thinking; THE MASTER *1 (Lincoln as seen, presumably, by one of his contemporaries, shortly after the Civil War) 1 A flying word from here and there Had sown the name at which we sneered, But soon the name was everywhere, To be reviled and then revered: A presence to be loved and feared, That we, the gentlemen who jeered, He came when days were perilous We doubted, even when he smiled, Not knowing what he knew so well. See pages 54, 84, 139, 142, 172. Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, from The Town down the River by E. A. Robinson. He knew that undeceiving fate Would shame us whom he served unsought; The jest of those for whom he fought; He knew that we must all be taught We gave a glamour to the task That he encountered and saw through, And little did we ever do. And what appears if we review The season when we railed and chaffed? It is the face of one who knew That we were learning while we laughed. The face that in our vision feels For he, to whom we have applied As he was ancient at his birth: The love, the grandeur, and the fame The calm, the smouldering, and the flame For we were not as other men: 1 AN OLD STORY1 Strange that I did not know him then, I did not even show him then But cursed him for the ways he had To make me see My envy of the praise he had For praising me. 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, from The Children of the Night. Dark hills at evening in the west, Were fading, and all wars were done. Whenever Richard Cory went down town, And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; And he was rich-yes, richer than a king, 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, from The Children of the Night. So on we worked, and waited for the light, And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Edgar Lee Masters Edgar Lee Masters was born at Garnett, Kansas, August 23, 1869, of old Puritan and pioneering stock. When he was still a boy, the family moved to Illinois, where, after desultory schooling, he studied law in his father's office at Lewiston. For a year he practised with his father and then went to Chicago, where he became a successful and prominent attorney. Before going to Chicago, Masters had composed a great quantity of verse in traditional forms on still more traditional themes; by the time he was twenty-four he had written about four hundred poems, revealing the result of wide reading and betraying the influence of Poe, Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. His work, previous to the publication of Spoon River Anthology, was derivative and undistinguished. Taking as his model The Greek Anthology, which his friend William Marion Reedy had pressed upon him, in 1914 Masters evolved Spoon River Anthology, that astonishing assemblage of over two hundred self-inscribed epitaphs, in which the dead of a middle Western town are supposed to have written the truth about themselves. Through these frank revelations, many of them interrelated, the village is recreated for us; it lives again, unvarnished and typical, with all its intrigues, hypocrisies, feuds, martyrdoms and occasional exaltations. The monotony of existence in a drab township, the defeat of ideals, the struggle toward higher goals-all is synthesized in these crowded pages. All moods and all manner of voices are heard here even Masters's, who explains the reason for his medium and the selection of his form through "Petit, the Poet." Starved Rock (1919), Domesday Book (1920) and The Open Sea (1921) are, like all Masters's later books, queerly assembled mixtures of good, bad and derivative verse. And yet, for all of this poet's borrowings, in spite of his cynicism and disillusion, |