His hates, however, do not always pass into poetry; they too frequently remain hard, sullen masses of animosity not fused with his narrative but standing out from it and adding an unmistakable personal rhythm to the rough beat of his verse.  So, too, do his heaps of turgid learning and his scientific speculations often remain undigested.  A good many of his characters are cut to fit the narrative plan, not chosen from reality to make up the narrative.  The total effect is often crude and heavy; and yet beneath these uncompleted surfaces are the sinews of enormous power:  a greedy gusto for life, a wide imaginative experience, tumultuous uprushes; of emotion and expression, an acute if undisciplined intelligence, great masses of the veritable stuff of existence out of which great novels are made.

Sherwood Anderson

Spoon River Anthology has called forth a smaller number of deliberate imitations than might have been expected, and even they have utilized its method with a difference.  Sherwood Anderson, for example, in Winesburg, Ohio speaks in accents and rhythms obstinately his own, though his book is, in effect, the Anthology “transprosed.”  Instead of inventing Winesburg immediately after Spoon River became famous he began his career more regularly, with the novels Windy McPherson’s Son and Marching Men, in which he employed what has become the formula of revolt for recent naturalism.  In both stories a superior youth, of rebellious energy and somewhat inarticulate ambition, detaches himself in disgust from his native village and makes his way to the city in search of that wealth which is the only thing the village has ever taught him to desire though it is unable to gratify his desires itself; and in both the youth, turned man, finds himself sickening with his prize in his hands and looks about him for some clue to the meaning of the mad world in which he has succeeded without satisfaction.  Sam McPherson, after a futile excursion through the proletariat in search of the peace which he has heard accompanies honest toil, settles down to the task of bringing up some children he has adopted and thus of forcing himself “back into the ranks of life.”  Beaut McGregor, refusing a handsome future at the bar, sets out to organize the workers of Chicago into marching men who drill in the streets and squares at night that they may be prepared for action if only they can find some sort of goal to march upon.

These novels ache with the sense of a dumb confusion in America; with a consciousness “of how men, coming out of Europe and given millions of square miles of black fertile land mines and forests, have failed in the challenge given them by fate and have produced out of the stately order of nature only the sordid disorder of man.”  Out of this ache of confusion comes no lucidity.  Sam McPherson is not sure but that he will find parenthood as petty as business was brutal; Beaut McGregor sets his men