SOURCE: “Out of the Heartland,” in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, February, 1992, pp. 381-94.

In the following excerpt, Cassity praises the 1992 edition of Spoon River.

At intervals of about seven years, novelists or dramatists seem compelled to savage Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, or the American small town. Unless you allow “Little Gidding,” poetry has rather ignored the life of the regimented. In the attack on Dubuque, however, it has led all the rest. One might even consider the work of Emily Dickinson as within the genre. But after seventy-eight years the ultimate weapon is still Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology.

It is not really very good poetry, and surely it told people nothing they did not know already. I grew up in a small town myself, and when I read it the first time—I must have been about seventeen—my only reaction...