Domesday Book was published by Macmillan in 1920. The poem is Masters’s most ambitious single work: a book-length narrative in blank verse that attempts to do in sustained form what Spoon River Anthology did in fragments — expose the hidden life of a rural Illinois community through the interlocking testimonies of its inhabitants.
The frame is a coroner’s inquest into the death of Elenor Murray, a young woman found dead under ambiguous circumstances. As witnesses testify, the poem expands outward from the single death to encompass the entire community: its relationships, rivalries, loves, hatreds, economic pressures, and moral failures. Each testimony reveals not only facts about Elenor but truths about the witness — creating the same layered, interconnected portrait of community life that distinguished Spoon River.
The title references William the Conqueror’s great survey of England in 1086 — a complete accounting of a community’s resources, relationships, and obligations. Masters’s ambition is similarly comprehensive: he wants to record everything about this place and these people, to create a document so complete that it preserves a vanishing way of life against the forces of industrialization and urbanization that are destroying it.
The poem received mixed reviews. Some critics praised its ambition and its sustained energy; others found it prolix and insufficiently selective. The blank verse — competent but not brilliant — lacks the compressed power of the free-verse epitaphs. Masters was always better in short forms than long ones, and 400 pages of blank verse test both writer and reader.
Collecting Domesday Book
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1920): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $25–$60
- Very good: $10–$25