Bitter Poet on Sad Poet

INVISIBLE LANDSCAPES -- Edgar Lee Masters--Macmillan ($2).

VACHEL LINDSAY--Edgar Lee Masters --Scribner ($3,).

When in 1914 the first poems of Spoon River Anthology were published in Reedy's Mirror, U. S. poets, critics and plain readers felt that they were at last hearing an authentic U. S. voice. Few poems have had such an immediate and widespread influence. The book was translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Danish, German, Swedish and Japanese, was praised, parodied, attacked and widely sold (80,000 volumes in 1915-16). To a generation that had revolted against the superficial optimism, the stock poses of genteel poets, the 200-odd austere epitaphs of Spoon River were more than an expression of honest and fruitful defiance. They seemed to prove that the common stuff of U. S. backyard existence, the daily labors, the aspirations, even the graceless material of small-town gossip and slander, could be woven into a poetic pattern that need not lack dignity and significance.

Edgar Lee Masters wrote Spoon River under the pseudonym of Webster Ford because he deeply distrusted the value of this work. A Chicago lawyer of 45, he was fighting a case in the Supreme Court of Illinois and an injunction against the Waitresses' Union while his poems were meeting their first extraordinary response. Born in Garnett, Kans., in 1869, he had spent most of his life in Illinois, where he learned the printing trade, worked on newspapers, studied law and wrote thin volumes of conventional verse. Like so many of his generation he looked upon poetry less as an art to be practiced than as a message to be preached, placing it on an eminence almost beyond human reach. When William Marion Reedy, after reading the first Spoon River poems, heaped extravagant praise upon them, Masters thought that his friend was being ironical.

The essential note in Spoon River was one of protest, of radical nationalism, of bitter resentment that U. S. poets and artists were so consistently abused and neglected by the country at large. In subsequent volumes Masters' poems, characterized by long speculations on vague concepts of life, nature, the soul, contrasted oddly with the concise, concrete images of recognizable human fates that had been the distinction of Spoon River.

After Domesday Book (1920) Edgar Lee Masters temporarily abandoned verse, wrote a series of thesis novels intended to demonstrate the spiritual superiority of the pre-indusrial Midwest over that of the present. His hostile biography of Lincoln gave evidence of his increasing concern with nationalism, since it presented Lincoln as the wrecker rather than the savior of the Union.

The equivocal character of these works lost Edgar Lee Masters much of his influence with other writers. Leaving Chicago for New York, he has published poems intermittently, traveled, worked for several years on a major effort, Atlantis, a long poem dealing with the discovery, growth and development of the U. S.

Now 66, sturdy, unbending, uncommunicative, with a reputation for gruffness, Edgar Lee Masters lives in an obscure hotel in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, seldom appears at New York literary gatherings. Since he dresses carelessly, wears heavy spectacles and a characteristic expression of thin-lipped disapproval, he looks not unlike some Midwestern deacon described in Spoon River Anthology. Baldish, he dislikes being photographed except when wearing a hat. Hilary, his 7-year-old son by his second marriage, summers with him in New York, winters in Kansas City with his mother.

Last week, with a new volume of verse and a biography of Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters gave further evidence of the unevenness of his poetic gift and of his fierce resentment at the low estate of poets in contemporary U. S. society. The 38 poems in Invisible Landscapes, ranging from patriotic pieces like Give Us Back Our Country, to the obscure, arid, rambling speculations of Hymn to the Earth, are far below the level of Spoon River.

His biography of Lindsay, aside from its value as a study in poetic frustration, throws a vivid light on the quality of the culture that nourished the poets of the Midwest school. Containing a great store of unassimilated information, lighted by occasional clairvoyant insights, the book seems less revealing of Lindsay than of Masters.

Lindsay's story is a sad one. Born of deeply religious parents in 1879, Lindsay showed a precocious gift for words, for sensitive, original observation. He also revealed an emotional and intellectual instability that became more apparent as he grew older. He attended Hiram College, a Campbellite institution, kept detailed diaries in which he developed grandiose poetic projects, studied the Bible and Poe, aspired to be both a major prophet and an independent thinker. Half-starved while attending an art institute in Chicago, he fled to New York, where he peddled his poems on the street at 2-c- apiece. Lonely, celibate, driven by feverish ambition, he tramped through the country, begging, sometimes reading and selling his poems, returned to Springfield where he published an incoherent newspaper and gave Anti-Saloon League lectures.

The success of General William Booth Enters Into Heaven after 1913 lifted him to an eminence almost as unhappy as his isolation had been. After his marriage in 1925, the responsibilities of a family wore on him heavily, since even at the height of his fame he could earn only $1,500 a year. With only $76 in his possession, $4.000 in debt and with a wife and two children to care for, he grew increasingly melancholy, developed delusions, sometimes heard voices plotting his death. He believed that the Jews were responsible for his failures, grew increasingly violent as he denounced his young wife as a scarlet woman. On Dec. 5, 1931, in Springfield, Ill. he poisoned himself, saying, "They tried to get me; I got them first."

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