Who is em stanton in doc hill

While Doc Hill has some blame to lay on his wife and his reprobate son, his main issue seems to be with another Spoon River resident. Lest one think the doctor was an entirely altruistic workaholic or simply obsessed with his medical practice, he wants to explain that such was not the case.

The doc begins by proffering the question as to why he spent so much time with his ill patients. He then reveals "why": His wife detested him, and his son felt no better toward his father. Thus, the doc had no family life. The doctor had to find consolation somewhere so he turned to his profession that involved other people, particularly sick folks, who became appreciative of his services.

However, the doc does not seem to assert that he was merely looking for love for himself. Part of his personality seems genuinely caring, although it also offers him an excuse for remaining absent from his home, marriage, and fatherhood. Likely the doc's explanation makes him sound more altruistic than one who is expecting attention in return: he was looking for people to whom he could give his love and caring. The doc's medical profession afforded him the opportunity, or perhaps excuse, to spend all of his time away from his own family while attending to others.

Less pathetic and crass than many of the Spoon River crowd, he, nevertheless, remains one of the forlorn characters as he spins his yarn. Thus, in death, he has achieved what he was never able to achieve in life with his own family. The summation of caring and affection that showed itself on the day of his funeral seems to make up for the familial affection he had not experienced. And that lack seems to extend into death, for he mentions the presence of neither his wife nor his son at his funeral.

Readers then may assume that they were not present, or that the doc cared so little for them that he fails to bother to account for their reactions to his death. Em Stanton appears to be assuaging her grief as she hides from the other mourners. The observation of Em standing behind a tree apparently grief-stricken shakes the doc so badly that he can hardly hold his soul power together as he tries to "hold to the railing of the new life.

By extension, readers might wonder if there may be other "Em-Stantons," who simply failed to appear and mourn as his own family failed to appear. S Government Postal Service.

Personal Finance. Welcome to HubPages. Related Articles. United States Politics. By Jason B Truth. Visiting Africa. By Mohamed Zeineldine. By Latreace Handy Stephens. By Ara Vahanian. Entertainment and Media. By Ryan Jarvis Cornelius. Masters dutifully read law with his father because his father, disdainful of poetry, insisted that his son study law; he achieved bar certification in He joined a Chicago law firm allied with attorney Clarence Darrow and specialized in labor and industrial casework.

After his marriage to Helen Jenkins, mother of their three children, he often visited Spring Lake, Wisconsin, where he established a sizable farm and he escaped his life as a lawyer. While successfully pursuing legal work and supporting populist political candidates in Chicago, Masters submitted unoriginal poems to Chicago newspapers.

Under the influence of editor William Marion Reedy, Masters gave up artsy poetry and initiated a characteristic style and subject choice that improved with succeeding poems. He produced a collection of self-revelatory verse epitaphs, Spoon River Anthology, drawing on settings and ordinary people he remembered from his youth in Lewiston. The work, a landmark American microcosm comprised of free verse satires of former residents of Illinois, appeared under the pseudonym Webster Ford in Reedy's St.

Louis Mirror from May to January before it was published in a stand-alone volume. The cleverly arranged verse soliloquies, naturalistic in their probing of the sterility of village life, earned him the Levinson Prize and a critical deluge that ranged from the highest praise to outright castigation.

In , two years after the publication of Toward the Gulf, a collection of lyrical ballads, Masters abandoned law to become a full-time poet, taking up residence in New York's Chelsea Hotel. A later anthology, The New Spoon River , criticized urbanism and helped to bracket the poet into the limited category of caustic satirist ridiculing city life. In , Masters remarried Ellen F.

Coyne and withdrew from the literary circuit. Throughout the s, Masters' various works — such as Poems of the People ; subsequent prose, including biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Vachel Lindsay, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain; and an autobiography, Across Spoon River — failed to alter the public perception of him as a dull, ponderous, but essentially courteous curmudgeon.

Despite a lack of popularity, Masters continued to publish: A late poetry collection, Illinois Poems , contains the title "Petersburg," recapturing a boyhood residence; The Sangamon lauds the beauties of the American Midwest. Masters died in a nursing home in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, on March 5, He was buried in nearby Oakland Cemetery. His Petersburg home became a museum. In Spoon River Anthology, Masters creates a symbol for democracy at the town cemetery when he "buries" long-past residents, such as the town marshal, druggist, physician, and a housewife, side-by-side.

Residents like "Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom, and Charley" lie alongside one unknown person and identified graves on the hill above Spoon River. Their passing, equally egalitarian, juxtaposes fates such as fever and accident with brawling, jail, childbirth, and a suspicious fall from a bridge. The lamentations, griefs, and woes about death give place to a comforting blessing, "All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

To characterize spiritual poverty and poetic tedium, Masters imprisons elegant verse style in a confining "dry pod. One of Masters' enduring characterizations of determination, "Lucinda Matlock" spins a tightly interconnected strand of meeting and marrying her husband and bearing their children. Locked into a pattern of nurturing, Lucinda devotes herself, over a seventy-year marriage, to raising children, nursing, and gardening. Now at age 96, she upbraids the young for their crankiness.