Songs and Satires was published by Macmillan in 1916, capitalizing on the enormous success of Spoon River Anthology the previous year. The collection demonstrates the range of Masters’s work beyond the epitaph form: it includes lyric poems, political satires (attacking capitalism, war, and political corruption), dramatic monologues, and longer narrative pieces.
The satires are sharp and politically engaged. Masters was a radical Democrat influenced by Populism, and his targets include plutocrats, militarists, religious hypocrites, and the corporate interests he believed controlled American politics. The political poems have energy and anger, though they sometimes sacrifice art to argument.
The lyrics are more surprising: Masters could write delicate, musical poems about nature, love, and mortality that reveal a sensibility quite different from the harsh realism of Spoon River. These poems show the influence of Shelley and Keats — nineteenth-century Romantic idealism coexisting with twentieth-century social critique in the same poet.
The collection was commercially successful — readers who had loved Spoon River bought it eagerly — but critics already detected the problem that would define Masters’s career: prolixity. He wrote too much, revised too little, and included material that needed more work. The best poems in Songs and Satires are excellent; the weaker ones dilute the collection’s impact.
Collecting Songs and Satires
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1916): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $10–$30