19–17050
For descriptive note see Annual for 1919.
“Perhaps the poet’s first worthy successor of ‘Spoon River’; but while displaying something of its sardonic spirit the present collection is of far wider range.”
+ Booklist 16:162 F ’20
“He is at his ripest and surest in such mordant and merciless analyses as Lord Byron to Doctor Polidori, The barber of Sepo. They’d never know me now, Oh you Sabbatarians! and that profound disquisition on Poe, Washington hospital. And the man who wrote Sagamore Hill, that incomparable portrait of Theodore Roosevelt; who wrote Chicago and I shall go down into this land, manifests an intimate understanding of the American heart at its noblest.” H: A. Lappin
+ Bookm 51:216 Ap ’20 250w + Cleveland p86 O ’20 20w
“In ‘Starved Rock’ there is little music but much food for thought.”
+ Ind 104:165 O 9 ’20 40w
“It is beginning to be apparent that Mr Masters neither can nor needs to depart from his original tone and method. He cannot do so profitably and there is no need, since the vein which served them seems inexhaustible. There are not lacking here the old familiar notes of sour, practical tragedy, of hoarse, heroic scepticism, of good, round, pagan, Chicago fleshliness. But [the reader] is sorry for a certain strenuous complacency which has been growing in Mr Masters over a considerable period and which is particularly objectionable in the present volume.”