The Great Valley

By: Masters, Edgar Lee

The most striking thing about "The Great Valley," however, is the resemblance to Browning. The following lines, typical of many, might have come straight out of "Bishop Blougram's Apology," or, for that matter, "Fra Lippo Lippi": "What is art? No picture would be painted, poem sung, Save for the thought that woman close at hand, Or somewhere in the world yet to be found By reason of the picture or the poem, Will see and love you for it." The resemblance to Browning in spirit was fore- shadowed in the "Spoon River Anthology." The dra- matic instinct, the power to get inside the hearts and brains of scores of different men and women, to see a single situation from the standpoints of half a dozen people concerned in it, -this is what, above all else, guided Browning, as it has guided Masters. But the similarity in form, in method of expression, scarcely per- ceptible amid the unruly chaos of the Spoon River graveyard, becomes startling in many of the poems in the later book. _Of Masters' extraordinary dramatic power there can be, it seems to me, no reasonable question. No other American poet has shown so consistently the ability to compress life into a few lines. "The Great Valley" frees him from the charge of concerning himself almost exclusively with squalid lives, to which the earlier volume fairly exposed him. The great question is as to the form in which he does it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1679302825
• ISBN13: 9781679302824
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"