书名：Spoon River Anthology匙河集

作者：Edgar Lee Masters
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2007
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451530585
商品尺寸：10.5 x 2.3 x 17.1 cm
包装：简装
页数：336
Spoon River Anthology《匙河集》是美国著名诗人马斯特斯所著的一部诗集。这是一部大胆创新的诗集，也是一部畅销诗集，它以平白直叙的墓志铭式的语言描绘出了一幅美国乡村画卷：长眠在墓地里的250位村民以自由诗独白的形式诉说他们的秘密、梦想和失败。

精彩书评
“高度的真实，详细刻画人物的力量，马斯特斯对各类美国人的熟悉，彻底搅动着整个美国文学界。” ——约翰·古尔德·弗莱彻

“《匙河集》并非紧凑热烈的诗材；它是反省的，不是即兴的；它的作者与其说是一位观察者，不如说是一位道德家。” ——T.S.艾略特

In 1915, Edgar Lee Masters published a book of dramatic monologues written in free verse about a fictional town called Spoon River, based on the Midwestern towns where he grew up. The shocking scandals and secret tragedies of Spoon River were immediately recognized by readers as authentic. Masters raises the dead “sleeping on the hill” in their village cemetery to tell the truth about their lives, and their testimony topples the American myth of the moral superiority of small-town life. Spoon River, as undeniably corrupt and cruel as the big city, is home to murderers, drunkards, crooked bankers, lechers, bitter wives, abusive husbands, failed dreamers, and a few good souls. The freshness of this masterpiece undiminished,Spoon River Anthologyremains a landmark of American literature.
With an Introduction by John Hollander and an Afterword by Ronald Primeau.

As a young man,Edgar Lee Masters(1869-1950) rebelled against what he believed to be the hypocrisy of small-town life and went to Chicago, where he practiced law for thirty years. He published eleven books of verses, plays, and essays before beginning his masterpiece,Spoon River Anthology(1915). Later, Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay initiated a poetic renaissance in the Midwest, with Chicago as its center.
In the summer of 1915, Theodore Dreiser held a reception for Edgar Lee Masters at his Greenwich Vicinage apartment. The two writers had known each other for at least three years. Dreiser. the “Father of American Realism” (or at least naturalism), was already famous for five or six books, most notably Sister Carrie, which in 1900 set the stage for novels and poetry that would envision life as a biological trap. Dreiser had blazed the trail in fiction that Masters followed in poetry. Indeed, by that summer the Chicago lawyer and former partner with Clarence Darrow was possibly more famous than the great Dreiser.Spoon River Anthology(1915) immediately became a huge literary splash. Its sales for the next three or four years made it America’s all-time best-seller for a serious book of poems.

Ever since the short poems began aping 1914 in the St. Louis weekly Ready’s Mirror, the excitement about this new poet had been mounting.
By the time it reached book form in the spring of 1915, Spoon River had gone through seven printings in the same number of months. “At last,” Ezra Pound announced from England in the Egoist, “America has discovered a poet.” He ranked Masters with T. S. Eliot, who had recently published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” On March 4, 1914, the Literary Digest wrote: “Not since the British discovered Walt Whitman for America and blamed us for our in-appreciation, has an American literary sensation struck England with the impact of ‘SpoonRiverAnthology.’”
The Spoon River poems initially appeared under the pseudonym Webster Ford. Masters, steeped in English literature as well as the Roman and Greek classics, had combined the surnames of two major dramatists of the English Renaissance known for their tragic themes: John Webster and John Ford. Now all the world knew the true identity of the author of the famous Spoon River epitaphs, lapidary, or tombstone verse that may have been inspired in part by such nineteenth-century works as E. V. Howe’sThe Story of a Country Town(1883) and Mark Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadley burg” (1899), stories that suggested the hypocrisy and superficiality of a small-town environment. On the other side of the spectrum,Spoon River Anthology, with its theme of the buried life, would open the way to such penetrating psychological works in the twentieth century as Sherwood Anderson’s Wines burg.Ohio(1919), Sinclair Lewis’sMainStreet(1920), and Thornton Wilder’sOurTown(1938), the principal monuments of a phase of American fiction known as “The Revolt from the Vifiage” (1915-30). Now the previously sacrosanct village or small-town life is depicted as no better than life in the immoral and indifferent city. The characters’ voices inSpoon River Anthologyspeak from the grave about their tormented and twisted lives—illicit love affairs, betrayed confidences, political corruption, and miserable marriages. As much the result of the author’s own pessimistic view of life as any factually based record, Masters’ book sums up the life of a small town’s residents who simply know too much about one another and burn eternally, like the flickering souls in Dante’s Inferno.