20 pages • 40 minutes read
Edgar Lee MastersGeorge Gray
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form
Although “George Gray” looks like a poem—set in lines that clearly mimic how a poem should look—the poem itself is a radical, even revolutionary declaration of formal independence. For the writers of Masters’ generation, who came of age on the threshold of a new century, every established tenet of faith that had long defined the American culture was giving way. Within that tonic environment of change, writers such as Masters viewed the inherited poetic forms that insisted on recycling lame, idealistic cliches about love and God, family and country, as antiquated and even irresponsible. To them, the form of a poem should reflect its contents, its arguments, and its themes, rather than impose artificially-set forms onto those themes.
For Masters, the agony and joys of his small-town residents would not fit without irony into the grand architecture of traditional form. These residents could not share their painfully honest assessments into their own misspent lives in the tidy neatness of, say, a sonnet or a villanelle or a sestina. Such delightful and intricate patterning would only distract from the emotional depth of the residents’ difficult confessions.
Free verse, however, allows each of Masters’ more than 200 subjects a verisimilitude and an immediacy. They are not speakers in poems, they are people speaking to us directly. Free verse eliminates the poet and reflects Masters’ conversational imperative. The lines are not regular. The metrical count of each line varies. Some lines are end-stopped; some ease into the next line.
Masters’ pattern defies pattern to create the feel of how these Midwesterners might actually talk. Much like the documentary realism that Masters uses to reveal these characters’ quietly twisted lives, the irregular form creates an intimacy with the subjects—they speak; they do not recite. The free form gives their confessions—George Gray, for instance, admitting to a life wasted—an intimacy and an immediacy. Reading the poem becomes more like listening to the person.
Meter
Because Masters was intrigued by capturing the poetic essence of the conversational plainspeak typical of the Midwesterners he wrote about, the meter in “George Gray” does not forward heavy beats and anticipated rhythms associated with the prosody of poetry before the revolution in free verse.
Thus, much like conversational speech, the lines do not force anything consistent—there is no percussive rhythm achieved through the manipulation of units of beat, called feet. Lines are not regular in length. Much like jazz, whose musical beginnings were just being felt in Masters’ Chicago, each line invites adlibbed recitation, creating about the poem a sense of muted spontaneity, the reading guided more by the content of George Gray’s painful revelations than by the metrics of beat.
For instance, take Line 6:
“For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;”
The end-stop gives the line its own integrity, its own completeness despite the obvious: It is elliptical, never actually identifying what happened. Because the line could be seen as grammatically incorrect (it is technically a run-on and requires a comma before the word “and”), the line suggests how painful this revelation is for George to make—he rushes through it. Because there is no comma where it should be, the line invites individual interpretation.
It is a different line if the reader lingers over “love” or over “offered” or over the line’s most terrifying word, “shrank” (itself a harsh and cacophonous sound). And there is the rich enveloping spaciousness of the closing word: George’s “disillusionment,” that multi-syllable word out of sync with the rest of the line and thus creating its own tempo-moment.
That every line can be so metered marks the poetic achievement of Masters and the enormous responsibility that his free verse places on the participatory reader.
Voice
It is difficult to appreciate the range and virtuosity of Masters as a poet by reading only one of the more than 240 monologues he created for the residents of Spoon River. Each verse seeks to create an individual voice in the sonic play of vowel and consonant sounds, as well as in diction, syntax, and the use of figurative language (George Gray, for instance, rhapsodizes on the sailboat and the open sea).
Masters inherited poetry that in its voice sought one of two templates: either the poet as teacher of broad and important lessons, or the poet as an emotional human being, feeling deeply and sharing those feelings. Masters does neither; he is never heard. Much the God-like figure who factors in the definition of the artist in the emerging manifestos of those restless and edgy writers who called themselves Modernists, Masters steps behind the scenes and allows his character(s) to speak for themselves.
The use of poetry to create a character distinct from the poet has its roots in theater since Antiquity. Indeed, Spoon River Anthology has been adapted for the stage, most notably in 1963 by veteran television character actor Charles Aidman (1925-1993). The premise of a multi-vocal work has lent the anthology to transcription into numerous musical compositions.
Voice here has a single purpose: to create a character. Because George Gray never shares his backstory—his family, his education, his work—he exists entirely as this voice, full of regrets, driven by his too-late epiphany of what his life might have been. In delivering his own eulogy, which is essentially what each of these short poems becomes, George Gray’s voice creates our sense of who he was, or, as in the case of George himself, who he opted not to be.
