The Spooniad by Edgar Lee Masters — Read

The late Mr. Jonathan Swift Somers,2 laureate of Spoon River, planned The Spooniad as an epic in twenty-four books, but unfortunately did not live to complete even the first book. The fragment was found among his papers by William Marion Reedy and was for the first time published in Reedy's Mirror of December 18th, 1914.

Of John Cabanis' wrath and of the strife / Of hostile parties, and his dire defeat / Who led the common people in the cause / Of freedom for Spoon River, and the fall / Of Rhodes' bank that brought unnumbered woes / And loss to many, with engendered hate / That flamed into the torch in Anarch hands / To burn the courthouse, on whose blackened wreck / A fairer temple rose and Progress stood --