Spoon River Anthology

After reading these Spoon River Anthology poems I found them to be quite interesting, and very unique compared to some of the poetry I have read before. Each poem tells its own story, but also relates to the other poems in the anthology to make one giant story. One thing I noticed about the poems are that many of them: are about death or graves, have questions posed in them, have repetition of some sort, and are about individual people.

This ties into "Our Town" in a way because Our Town had similar things in it. It was about individual people in a small town, told its own story of the town, and dealt a lot with death and dying, as the anthology does. If I were a teacher trying to use the Spoon River Anthology in a classroom where we read Our Town, I would probably stress the death aspect and have the students talk about how the poems talk about death in a similar or different way than that of Our Town. I would also point out how the anthology of poems have different people's names as their titles, and have the students explain to me the meaning behind this, what it adds to the poems, and if it makes them feel like the person in the poem is important because the whole individual poem is focused on them. Then I would have the students tell me if they think that each character in Our Town was important, and why or why not. I would end by asking them which form they liked better as a story telling method - the play or the anthology of poems - and why.