WILDER MASTERS: RECOLLECTIONS OF DEPARTED SOULS
WILDER MASTERS: RECOLLECTIONS OF DEPARTED SOULS

Summary/Abstract: The title of this paper is primarily meant to show the relationship between works by Edgar Lee Masters and Thornton Wilder, though the juxtaposition of the two family names may invite other interpretations that the author does not fully neglect. Spoon River Anthology (1915, before World War I) and Our Town (1938, before World War II) seem to be providing oblique commentaries—“a cemetery on the hill”—or “the city upon a hill” metaphor/myth/legend/allegory… of America proposed by John Winthrop in his 1630 famous sermon on board the Arbella. The substance of the paper is based upon the two worlds in the epigraph, the world of the living and the world of the dead, joined together by memory. history, mythology, and poetry in the messages sent by the dead in the two works, meant to provide imaginative bridges that the living (including the two authors) have always tried to build and (almost) never succeeded; the similarities between the two universes (Midwest and New England) are less important than the complex visions of Masters’ and Wilder’s remembered voices.

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