In 1914, Masters, at the suggestion of his friend William Marion Reedy, turned from his preoccupation with classic subjects and began to draw upon the life he knew for those concise records which have made him famous. Taking as his model _The Greek Anthology_, which Reedy had pressed upon him, 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 crippling 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.”
The success of the volume was stupendous. (See Preface.) With every new attack (and its frankness continued to make fresh enemies) its readers increased; it was imitated, parodied, reviled as “a piece of yellow journalism;” hailed as “an American Comédie Humaine.” Finally, after the storm of controversy, it has taken its place as a landmark in American literature.
With _Spoon River Anthology_ Masters arrived—and left. He went back to his first rhetorical style, resurrecting many of his earlier trifles, reprinting dull echoes of Tennyson, imitations of Shelley, archaic paraphrases in the manner of Swinburne. Yet, though none of Masters’s subsequent volumes can be compared to his masterpiece, all of them contain examples of the same straightforwardness, the stubborn searching for truth that intensified his best known characterizations.
_Songs and Satires_ (1916) contains the startling “All Life in a Life” and the gravely moving “Silence.” _The Great Valley_ (1916) is packed with echoes and a growing dependence on Browning. In _Toward the Gulf_ (1918), the Browning influence predominates, although there are such splendid individual monologues as “The World Saver,” “St. Deseret” and “Front the Ages with a Smile.” _Starved Rock_ (1919) and _Domesday Book_ (1920) 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, Masters’s work is a continual searching for some key to the mystery of truth, the mastery of life.