It opens with a poem that asks "Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom, and Charley?" and responds "All, all are sleeping on the hill".
One poem in this collection laments how "the manuscripts of a lifetime of sermons" were burned as waste-paper by a "grog-keeper". The speaker of another poem in this collection cries "Look at my moulds! My architectonics!" The speaker describes wounding, then caging, a hawk for whose soul he now searches in its poem "The Unknown". It ends with an "Epilogue" in which Loki and Yogarindra watch Beelzebub create men out of clay, while its penultimate poem is a fragmentary epic supposedly written by Jonathan (*) Swift Somers. Another of its poems quotes Lincoln's second inaugural address and is attributed to Anne Rutledge. It opens with a poem that asks "Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom, and Charley?" and responds "All, all are sleeping on the hill". For 10 points, name this collection of epitaphs for and delivered by the dead of an Illinois town, written by Edgar Lee Masters.
One poem in this collection laments how "the manuscripts of a lifetime of sermons" were burned as waste-paper by a "grog-keeper".
Spoon River Anthology