448 Making It New: 1900–1945Predictably, his hopes remained unrealized; less predictably, and more tragically, he
committed suicide. Whatever may be thought of his work and aims, though,
he remains a curiously noble figure: someone who took the populist fervor, the
pedagogical and proselytizing impulses implicit in the American tradition to their
logical and not entirely absurd extreme.
A third memorable writer associated with the Chicago Renaissance was a populist
in a different sense, in that he wanted to record the real lives of people as they were
lived in the Middle West, without heroic disguise or romantic decoration. Edgar Lee
Masters (1868–1950) aimed, he said, to write “a sort of Divine Comedy” of small-
town life: its minor tragedies, its melancholy, and its frustrations. Like Sandburg
and Lindsay, he received the encouragement of Harriet Monroe; and it was still
quite early on in his career when the major fruit of his labors appeared, Spoon River
Anthology (1915). Using a loose verse form and spare, dry language, Masters presents
the reader with a series of self-spoken epitaphs. The tone is sometimes elegiac,
very occasionally lyrical and affirmative, but the major impression left by the book
is one of waste. Men, women, and children reveal what happened to them and what
happened was, for the most part, shame and disappointment. “Why, a moral truth is
a hollow tooth / Which must be propped with gold,” declares “Sersmith the Dentist”
at the conclusion of his epitaph; and the gaunt, bitter tone of this is characteristic.
Gradually, the poems overlap to produce a composite picture of Spoon River: a
picture that recalls Tilbury Town, Winesburg, Ohio, but without the passion and the
mystery, or Robinson’s and Sherwood Anderson’s sense that perhaps something
more lies beneath the monotonous surface. Masters is largely remembered now as
an example of that reaction against small-town values which characterized so many
American writers early on in the twentieth century. Perhaps it would be more useful,
though, to remember him as someone who attempted to honor the stoicism of
ordinary men and women, their laconic idioms and the harsh rhythms of their
existence – and, in this sense at least, achieved one of the aims of American populist
writing – of speaking not only to the people (Masters was immensely popular for a
time) but for them.
Implicit in the work of Sandburg, Lindsay, and even Masters is a kind of radicalism:
the kind that Whitman gave voice to when he declared that “our American republic”
was “experimental ... in the deepest sense.” It was left to some other writers, however,
to give free rein to this radical feeling: with them, the populist strain was sometimes
still evident but, even when it was, it was absorbed into a larger structure of feeling
that anticipated political, social, and perhaps social change. Responding in part to
the horrors of the Depression, in part to the wider economic pressures the United
States was experiencing between the two world wars, these writers were politically
engaged. Notions of commitment and relevance lay fairly close to the surface in
much of their work. In short, they wanted America altered, and they said so in no
uncertain terms. Among the poets were many who used a documentary mode.
Alfred Hayes (1911–1985), for example, took on the voice of a young, unemployed
man in a poem titled “In a Coffee Pot” (1936) to capture the boredom and despair
of those denied a chance by society. And in “Up-State Depression Summer” (1936),GGray_c04.indd 448ray_c 04 .indd 448 8 8/1/2011 7:53:59 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 59 AM