Spoon River Anthology

Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology lets the dead of a small American town speak in piercing monologues of ambition, shame, desire, and regret.

At a glance Spoon River Anthology is one of the great formal surprises in American poetry: a… Edgar Lee Masters turns epitaph into drama, building a chorus of voices that reveal the… Why read it now? The poems remain startling because they are brief, direct, and devastatingly social.

What kind of classic is it?