This is one of the most famous books of 20th century American poetry.
Unlike the previously reviewed Poet in New York by Garcia Lorca and Let us compare mythologies by Leonard Cohen, most of Masters' poems can be easily paraphrased. The text always tends to "mean" something easily understandable by the reader.
Masters' idea was pretty powerful: he imagined that all the people buried in the graveyard of a fictitious Illinois town tell us something about their lives. Each poem is thus presented as a sort of auto-epitaph. The fictional cemetery hosts the spoils of people from all walks of life: poor and rich, illiterate and erudite, criminals and heroes. As the author himself pointed out, the structure is inspired by Dante's Divina Commedia, with a sort of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, where the characters are placed according to their lifestyle, morals and social standing.
The names are made up, mostly a mix of given and family names of people that the author actually met or heard about. The whole anthology is a result of various character studies that Masters carried out when he was a young boy living in a small town and as an attorney working in Chicago. A beautiful portrait of human nature, at its worst and at its best.
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