Starved Rock was published by Macmillan in 1919. The title poem addresses the great sandstone butte on the Illinois River where, according to tradition, the last members of the Illinois Confederacy were besieged by Ottawa and Potawatomi warriors in the 1760s and starved to death — an image of total extinction that Masters uses as a metaphor for the losses of modernity.
The collection extends the landscape poetry of The Great Valley while adding a darker elegiac note. Masters writes about the destruction of the natural environment by industry and agriculture, the extinction of Native peoples and their cultures, the spiritual poverty of communities that have exchanged beauty for commerce, and the individual’s powerlessness before historical forces. The tone is closer to the social criticism of Spoon River than to the celebratory nature poetry of The Great Valley.
Several poems address World War I — which ended the year before publication — and its destruction of European civilization’s pretensions to moral superiority. Masters saw the war as confirmation of his darkest views about human nature and institutional corruption.
The collection is uneven — Masters’s later work always is — but the best poems achieve a haunted, elegiac power. The Illinois landscape, in Masters’s hands, is never merely scenic: it is layered with history, loss, and moral meaning. Every river and rock formation carries the weight of what happened there and what was destroyed.
Collecting Starved Rock
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1919): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $8–$20