Before going to Chicago, Masters had composed a great quantity of verse in traditional forms on still more traditional themes; by the time he was twenty-four he had written about four hundred poems, revealing the result of wide reading and betraying the influence of Poe, Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. His work, previous to the publication of _Spoon River Anthology_, was derivative and undistinguished. In 1895 he wrote a blank verse play on Benedict Arnold. In 1898 he published _A Book of Verses_, a selection of some sixty of the early four hundred. In 1902 _Maximilian_, another blank verse play, appeared, causing no more comment than the others. Nothing daunted, Masters published several volumes in rapid succession (three books of poetry appearing, under various pseudonyms, between 1905 and 1912), _The New Star Chamber and Other Essays_ (1904), _Blood of the Prophets_ (1905), _Althea_, a play (1907), _The Trifler_, another play (1908). In 1914, Masters, at the suggestion of his friend William Marion Reedy, turned from his preoccupation with classic subjects and began to draw upon the life he knew for those concise records which have made him famous. Taking as his model _The Greek Anthology_, which Reedy had pressed upon him, Masters evolved _Spoon River Anthology_, that astonishing assemblage of over two hundred self-inscribed epitaphs, in which the dead of a middle Western town are supposed to have written the truth about themselves. Through these frank revelations, many of them interrelated, the village is recreated for us; it lives again, unvarnished and typical, with all its intrigues, hypocrisies, feuds, martyrdoms and occasional exaltations. The crippling monotony of existence in a drab township, the defeat of ideals, the struggle toward higher goals—all is synthesized in these crowded pages. All moods and all manner of voices are heard here—even Masters’s, who explains the reason for his medium and the selection of his form through “Petit, the Poet.” The success of the volume was stupendous. (See Preface.) With every new attack (and its frankness continued to make fresh enemies) its readers increased; it was imitated, parodied, reviled as “a piece of yellow journalism;” hailed as “an American Comédie Humaine.” Finally, after the storm of controversy, it has taken its place as a landmark in American literature. With _Spoon River Anthology_ Masters arrived—and left. He went back to his first rhetorical style, resurrecting many of his earlier trifles, reprinting dull echoes of Tennyson, imitations of Shelley, archaic paraphrases in the manner of Swinburne. Yet, though none of Masters’s subsequent volumes can be compared to his masterpiece, all of them contain examples of the same straightforwardness, the stubborn searching for truth that intensified his best known characterizations.