Books: Bitter Poet on Sad Poet

INVISIBLE LANDSCAPES — Edgar Lee Masters—Macmillan ($2).

VACHEL LINDSAY—Edgar Lee Masters —Scribner ($3,).

When in 1914 the first poems of Spoon River Anthology were published in Reedy's Mirror, U. S. poets, critics and plain readers felt that they were at last hearing an authentic U. S. voice. Few poems have had such an immediate and widespread influence. The book was translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Danish, German, Swedish and Japanese, was praised, parodied, attacked and widely sold (80,000 volumes in 1915-16). To a generation that had revolted against the superficial optimism, the...