Books: Old Man Spoon River

THE NEW WORLD—Edgar Lee Masters —Appleton-Century ($2.50).

Unmentioned in geographies, Spoon River is a middlewestern small town that appears on every American literary map. It has been there since 1915, when Poet Edgar Lee Masters published 200-odd hard-bitten epitaphs from an imaginary small-town graveyard, entitled thecollection Spoon River Anthology. Bizarre in 1915, the book’s candor seems natural in 1937, thus serves as a calculus of the reading public’s growing ability to accept life’s poison with life’s meat.

Those who figure that an author’s abilities should at least keep pace with his public’s have had their calculations upset by Author Masters’ post-Spoon River performances. Thirty-two generally humdrum volumes of prose and verse have poured from his pen into the literary ocean, and have disappeared with faint gurgles barely audible to the public at large. But the sense of Poet Masters’ potential ability lingers on; and to a loyal band of U. S. readers every new Masters book comes bound in hope as well as boards.

Disappointment No. 33 is his new epical poem The New World. Homerically splendid in conception but plain dull, for the most part, in execution, the book presents a detailed catalog of slips whereby the New World has fallen from its original promise of a New Age to the “age of brass” following Appomattox; to the ”age of gas” initiated by “logolyrist” Woodrow Wilson; finally to the “age of soap-grease” sponsored by Franklin Roosevelt. Most tragic slip, in Poet Masters’ reckoning, was the Civil War:

No good came of it that would not have come without it.

And evil came of it that never would have come

Except with it, and as its bitter fruit.

Most heedless slip, the U. S. entry into the World War:

Why in the wreck of an Old World

Did the New World have to be engulfed? . . .

What devil proved by these days

That nothing matters, that human life is caught

In cataclysms. . . .

Latest, perhaps last slip is what he sees as the current creeping relegation of the Constitution to a rubbish pile where every forgotten man can pick it over.*

In the Spoon River Anthology Poet Masters took an on-the-level look into a country graveyard, recorded what he saw with somewhat embittered candor, somewhat graveled acquiescence. In The New World, with a more opinionated candor and a more griped acquiescence he looks at U. S. history not on its level but reverentially from below and disgustedly from above, presents accordingly a vertically wall-eyed view of it. But his straightforward earnestness is as honest as his previous straightforward sight, and all U. S. readers will find themselves rising to their feet at Poet Masters’ benediction:

But this New World is forever new to hands that keep it new.

*Poet Masters has been, since 1891, a member of the bar.