#AmericanWriters
The very fall my sister Nancy Kna… Set fire to the house They were trying Dr. Duval For the murder of Zora Clemens, And I sat in the court two weeks
Have any of you, passers-by, Had an old tooth that was an uncea… Or a pain in the side that never q… Or a malignant growth that grew wi… So that even in profoundest slumbe…
[The late Mr. Jonathan Swift Somers, laureate of Spoon River, planned The Spooniad as an epic in twenty-four books, but unfortunately did not live to complete even the first book. The f...
Out of the lights and roar of citi… Drifting down like a spark in Spo… Burnt out with the fire of drink,… The paramour of a woman I took in… But to hide a wounded pride as wel…
Oh, you young radicals and dreamer… You dauntless fledglings Who pass by my headstone, Mock not its record of my captainc… And my faith in God!
A chaplain in the army, A chaplain in the prisons, An exhorter in Spoon River, Drunk with divinity, Spoon River— Yet bringing poor Eliza Johnson t…
Almost the shell of a woman after… And almost a year to creep back in… Till the dawn of our wedding decen… Found me my seeming self again. We walked the forest together,
I said when they handed me my dipl… I said to myself I will be good And wise and brave and helpful to… I said I will carry the Christian… Into the practice of medicine!
Deities! Inexorable revealers, Give me strength to endure The gifts of the Muses, Daughters of Memory.
My mind was a mirror: It saw what it saw, it knew what i… In youth my mind was just a mirror In a rapidly flying car, Which catches and loses bits of th…
My life’s blossom might have bloom… Save for a bitter wind which stunt… On the side of me which you in the… From the dust I lift a voice of p… My flowering side you never saw!
Neither spite, fellow citizens, Nor forgetfulness of the shiftless… And the lawlessness and waste Under democracy’s rule in Spoon R… Made me desert the party of law an…
They got me into the Sunday-schoo… In Spoon River And tried to get me to drop Confu… I could have been no worse off If I had tried to get them to dro…
I was a lawyer like Harmon Whitne… Or Kinsey Keene or Garrison Stan… For I tried the rights of propert… Although by lamp-light, for thirty… In that poker room in the opera ho…
I sat on the bank above Bernadott… And dropped crumbs in the water, Just to see the minnows bump each… Until the strongest got the prize. Or I went to my little pasture,