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Spoon River Anthology

Spoon River Bard

Turn to the Edgar Lee Masters entry in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (I happen to be looking at the 14th edition, published in 1968, the centennial anniversary of Masters's birth), and you will find brief quotations from five poems that originally appeared in the poet's most famous work, Spoon River Anthology (1915). Only one poem, "Anne Rutledge," contributes two different quotations, the first consisting of two lines that open this famous twelve-line epitaph ("Out of me unworthy and unknown / The vibrations of deathless music") and the second bearing the annunciation at the core of Rutledge's posthumous monologue: "I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, / Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln." If I were editing the next edition of Bartlett's and did not have to worry about space, I would include the following two lines as well: "Wedded to him, not through union, / But through separation."