Petit, the Poet

"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 characteristics, the likes of which you'll find in nearly any poem in there: a) the speaker is a dead person, b) the speaker is a dead person who doesn't have very nice things to say about his or her life, and c) the speaker is a dead person who doesn't have very nice things to say about his or her life, and they say those not-nice things in free verse form.