#Americans
(Europe Conquers America.) Strong for the strong and in his o… Half-boy, half-madman, playing wit… Usurper, hoodlum, wed to his desir… Loud in the hunt—afraid albeit to…
She loved me. Oh! how she loved m… I never had a chance to escape From the day she first saw me. But then after we were married I… She might prove her mortality and…
There at Geneva where Mt. Blanc… The wine-hued lake like a cloud, w… Out of an empty sky of blue, and t… Hurried under the bridge through c… And the music along the cafés was…
I loathed you, Spoon River. I tr… I was ashamed of you. I despised… As the place of my nativity. And there in Rome, among the arti… Speaking Italian, speaking French…
You would not believe, would you That I came from good Welsh stock… That I was purer blooded than the… And of more direct lineage than th… And Virginians of Spoon River?
From Bindle’s opera house in the… To Broadway is a great step. But I tried to take it, my ambiti… When sixteen years of age, Seeing “East Lynne” played here i…
My valiant fight! For I call it v… With my father’s beliefs from old… Hating slavery, but no less war. I, full of spirit, audacity, coura… Thrown into life here in Spoon Ri…
I preached four thousand sermons, I conducted forty revivals, And baptized many converts. Yet no deed of mine Shines brighter in the memory of t…
I tried to win the nomination For president of the County-board And I made speeches all over the… Denouncing Solomon Purple, my riv… As an enemy of the people,
He protested all his life long The newspapers lied about him vill… That he was not at fault for Mine… But only tried to help her. Poor soul so sunk in sin he could…
I won the prize essay at school Here in the village, And published a novel before I wa… I went to the city for themes and… There married the banker’s daughte…
’Twas the shrunken soul of the tra… That whined in a coign of the dark… And the fiends were aroused from s… When Cerberus began to bark. ‘Methought that I spoke’ said Jul…
Reading in Ovid the sorrowful sto… Son of the love of Tereus and Pro… For the guilty passion of Tereus… The flesh of him served to Tereus… And the wrath of Tereus, the murd…
When conquerors lift the bloody sh… Showing the fallen’s ooze of life, And on a waste of blasted field Joy quickens to the drum and fife, Then the weird brood of flame and…
[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...