Mastering Edgar Lee

The tables were turned in my American Lit Survey class this morning: generally I'm the one trying to persuade reluctant students to appreciate an author who makes them want to run screaming from the room, but today it was the other way around. The subject was Edgar Lee Masters. Now I admit that I have read and written on Masters and I have come to appreciate and perhaps even admire his accomplishment in Spoon River Anthology, but when it comes to actually reading the poems--well, I'd really rather not.

Many of my students, on the other hand, were enthusiastic about the six Masters poems in their anthology. "Help me to understand what you enjoy about these poems," I said, and they did: they like the individual voices that build a complex vision of the human condition; they like the little moral lessons liberally sprinkled among the poems; they like the scientific metaphors used to explain human behavior; and they really like the casual, almost raw language and free verse.

No one said anything about how heavy the poems feel, how lacking in awareness of the rhythms of the English language. There was some appreciation for the poet's liberal use of irony, but many students were eager to accept Masters's little sermonettes at face value, as if irony did not enter into the equation and the entire collection could be summed up by cliches about living life to the fullest. And while the students recognized the bleakness of Masters's vision, this did not prevent them from taking pleasure in the poems.

So I guess the problem is mine. I recently re-read all 300ish pages of Spoon River Anthology in preparation for a conference paper, and it felt like being force-fed tombstones: the poems are clunky and awkward and stink of the grave, and the language is turgid at times and generally uninspired. Here, for instance, is "Griffy the Cooper":

The cooper should know about tubs.
But I learned about life as well,
And you who loiter around these graves
Think you know life.
You think your eye sweeps about a wide horizon, perhaps,
In truth you are only looking around the interior of your tub.
You cannot lift yourself to its rim
And see the outer world of things,
And at the same time see yourself.
You are submerged in the tub of yourself--
Taboos and rules and appearances,
Are the staves of your tub.
Break them and dispel the witchcraft
Of thinking your tub is life!
And that you know life!

I suppose it's interesting to imagine that the local cooper could be Plato in disguise, but beyond that, this poem leaves me cold. It tells too much and tells it flatly, and it sounds like it ought to be read in that awful pretentious drone common to bad poetry readings, the voice suggesting that the poet is Very Very Serious while the rest of us are simply pathetic, unenlightened schmucks submerged in the tub of ourselves.

Maybe that's true. If so, it would explain why I don't enjoy reading Edgar Lee Masters. Appreciate, yes. Admire, yes. Enjoy? Never.