Anger like his springs from a poetic elevation of spirit; toward the end Spoon River Anthology rises to a mystical vision of human life by comparison with which the scavenging epitaphs of the first half seem, though witty, yet insolent and trivial.  It is perhaps not necessary to point out that the numerous poets and novelists who have learned a lesson from the book have learned it less powerfully from the difficult later pages than from those in which the text is easiest.

Mr. Masters himself has not always remembered the harder and better lesson.  During a half dozen years he has published more than a half dozen books which have all inherited the credit of the Anthology but which all betray the turbulent, nervous habit of experimentation which makes up a large share of his literary character.  There comes to mind the figure of a blind-folded Apollo, eager and lusty, who continually runs forward on the trail of poetry and truth but who, because of his blindfoldedness, only now and then strikes the central track.  Five of Mr. Masters’s later books are collections of miscellaneous verse; during the fruitful year 1920 he undertook two longer flights of fiction.  In Mitch Miller he attempted in prose to write a new Tom Sawyer for the Spoon River district; in Domesday Book he applied the method of The Ring and the Book to the material of Starved Rock.  The impulse of the first must have been much the same as Mark Twain’s:  a desire to catch in a stouter net than memory itself the recollections of boyhood which haunt disillusioned men.  But as Mr. Masters is immensely less boylike than Mark Twain, elegy and argument thrust themselves into the chronicle of Mitch and Skeet, with an occasional tincture of a fierce hatred felt toward the politics and theology of Spoon River.  A story of boyhood, that lithe, muscular age, cannot carry such a burden of doctrine.  The narrative is tangled in a snarl of moods.  Its movement is often thick, its wings often gummed and heavy.

The same qualities may be noted in Domesday Book.  Its scheme and machinery are promising:  a philosophical coroner, holding his inquest over the body of a girl found mysteriously dead, undertakes to trace the mystery not only to its immediate cause but up to its primary source and out to its remotest consequences.  At times the tale means to be an allegory of America during the troubled, roiled, destroying years of the war; at times it means to be a “census spiritual” of American society.  Elenor Murray, in her birth and love and sufferings and desperate end, is represented as pure nature, “essential genius,” acting out its fated processes in a world of futile or corrupting inhibitions.  But Mr. Masters has less skill at portraying the sheer genius of an individual than at arraigning the inhibitions of the individual’s society.  When he steps down from his watch-tower of irony he can hate as no other American poet does.