Petit, the Poet Analysis

Brace yourselves, Shmoopers: this is a poem about… poetry. There's a fancy word for this kind of poem—"meta-textual"—which just means that it's thinking about itself, even as it's being writt...

Like so many other poems in Spoon River Anthology, we're introduced to our speaker right in the title. Shmoopers, meet Petit, the poet. Again, like his Spoon River compatriots, poor Petit has passe...

The setting of this poem is dark, gang, as dark as the bottom of a grave. That's because our man Petit, in addition to being a poet, is also dead. So, if you really and truly wanted to travel to th...

Just because Masters opted for free verse when he put this poem together, that doesn't mean that it abandons all poetic techniques entirely. We mean, if Masters wanted to totally get away from poet...

Our title is "Petit, the Poet." Now, you don't have to have read any of the Spoon River Anthology to understand the full significance of this title—but it helps (just sayin'). That's because, if...

"Petit, the Poet" is a good representation of the kind of work for which Edgar Lee Masters is most famous. It comes from his best-known collection, Spoon River Anthology, and features the following...

Sure, there may be a vocab word or two to throw you off, but the going is fairly easy in this one. Once you have the super-duper-glorious insights of Shmoop to shine a light on those obscure poetry...

Spoon River Anthology was an imitation of the Greek Anthology, a collection of some 4,500 poems about the dead. (Source.)In addition to his poetry, Edgar Lee Masters was once a lawyer, partnering...

Everything's pretty dull, dry, and predictable here, folks—nothing to see. Sure, a few mites might get into a tussle, but that's hardly worth paying attention to.

Homer (18)Walt Whitman (18)