I picked up
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln to read during a short vacation. I did not finish it yet, but it's an excellent book; I'm quite engaged with it.
I was excited to see that it quotes an Spoon River Anthology poem early on. (The index tells me this is the only SRA poem quoted.) It quotes arguably the most famous of the SRA poems:
Anne Rutledge
OUT of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!
Anne Rutledge was the young love of Abraham Lincoln. She died early, and he never got over it, or so the story goes. There's not a whole lot of evidence to support this, but it's certainly part of the Lincoln legend that she died young, and that the loss affected Lincoln forever.
Abraham Lincoln haunts Spoon River. The poems in Spoon River are set roughly during the turn of the century, so the Civil War would have been in the living memory of some of the older people of Spoon River. I think a good idea for a student paper would be to trace the influence of Lincoln and the Civil War in Spoon River Anthology.
My favorite Lincoln poem from SRA, though, is this one:
Hannah Armstrong
I WROTE him a letter asking him for old times’ sake
To discharge my sick boy from the army;
But maybe he couldn’t read it.
Then I went to town and had James Garber,
Who wrote beautifully, write him a letter;
But maybe that was lost in the mails.
So I traveled all the way to Washington.
I was more than an hour finding the White House.
And when I found it they turned me away,
Hiding their smiles. Then I thought:
“Oh, well, he ain’t the same as when I boarded him
And he and my husband worked together
And all of us called him Abe, there in Menard.”
As a last attempt I turned to a guard and said:
“Please say it’s old Aunt Hannah Armstrong
From Illinois, come to see him about her sick boy
In the army.”
Well, just in a moment they let me in!
And when he saw me he broke in a laugh,
And dropped his business as president,
And wrote in his own hand Doug’s discharge,
Talking the while of the early days,
And telling stories.
You have to be cautious about examing war in Spoon River Anthology, though, because some of the poems refer to the Spanish-American War, not the Civil War. One of the most moving poems, "Harry Wilmans," refers to the Spanish-American War, which Masters very much opposed.
Harry Wilmans
I WAS just turned twenty-one,
And Henry Phipps, the Sunday-school superintendent,
Made a speech in Bindle’s Opera House.
“The honor of the flag must be upheld,” he said,
“Whether it be assailed by a barbarous tribe of Tagalogs
Or the greatest power in Europe.”
And we cheered and cheered the speech and the flag he waved
As he spoke.
And I went to the war in spite of my father,
And followed the flag till I saw it raised
By our camp in a rice field near Manila,
And all of us cheered and cheered it.
But there were flies and poisonous things;
And there was the deadly water,
And the cruel heat,
And the sickening, putrid food;
And the smell of the trench just back of the tents
Where the soldiers went to empty themselves;
And there were the whores who followed us, full of syphilis;
And beastly acts between ourselves or alone,
With bullying, hatred, degradation among us,
And days of loathing and nights of fear
To the hour of the charge through the steaming swamp,
Following the flag,
Till I fell with a scream, shot through the guts.
Now there’s a flag over me in Spoon River!
A flag! A flag!
