![]() Within two years, in 1891, however, Masters’ regimen of self-directed study enabled him to pass the Illinois bar. Over his father’s objections, Masters enrolled at Knox College, a pricey private liberal arts school in faraway Kentucky, but he stayed only a year before money issues forced him to drop out. Early on, Masters, along with few friends, found comfort in books, particularly the dreamy emotionalism and rural celebrations of the British High Romantics and the forbidding gothic tones of Edgar Allan Poe. The son of an attorney who never quite succeeded, Edgar Lee Masters had a peripatetic childhood, born in 1868 in the small town of Garnett, Kansas, but growing up, for the most part, in the Illinois town of Lewistown about an hour north of Springfield. In this, the poem explores the dynamics of regret, the terror of risk, and the steep price paid for a quiet and comfortable life. “George Gray,” for instance, speaks to a life of cautious and deliberate dedication to routine that views risk as too risky and ambition too ambitious. ![]() Masters’ poems suggested that in such an apparently pleasant and quiet rural world dwelled people whose lives were lacerated by doubts, obsessions, desires, and immorality. ![]() Although the volume met with critical success for its plainspoken eloquence that generated, in turn, wide commercial appeal, the portrait that the cycle of poems presented of life in smalltown Midwest America disturbed many. ![]()
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