Before Spoon River Anthology startled readers in 1915, Edgar Lee Masters had spent years in Illinois courtrooms watching respectable people explain themselves. The book’s dead citizens speak in unrhymed epitaphs, and “Editor Whedon” is one of the most corrosive voices among them. In an era when a local newspaper could shape a town’s memory, Whedon confesses that his professional flexibility was really a form of sabotage.
The poem unspools as a list of infinitives: “To be able to see every side of every question; / To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long.” What sounds like open-mindedness quickly turns cynical. Whedon admits he could “pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose” and use the “great feelings and passions of the human family / For base designs, for cunning ends.” His editorial page is a Greek mask, his “eight-page paper” a hiding place. From behind it he bawls “This is I, the giant,” while quietly living “the life of a sneak-thief.” That split between the public giant and the secret thief is the poem’s central insight: the editor’s power depends on anonymity and the manipulation of other people’s emotions. The image of the “paranoiac boy” who puts a log on the track and derails an express train turns this hidden malice into a fantasy of public destruction.
Masters shapes the poem as free verse, with no regular rhyme or meter, but the repeated “To be” and “To use” and “To scratch” clauses build a rhythmic drumbeat. The long first sentence mimics the editor’s endless rationalizations, until it crashes into shorter phrases: “Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be, / To win at any cost, save your own life.” Then the poem makes its sharpest turn. “To be an editor, as I was” is followed immediately by “Then to lie here close by the river.” The speaker drops from professional pride to the actual ground where his body rests.
The imagery forms a chain of concealment and waste. The “mask” of the Greek actors joins the “sneak-thief” and the “poisoned” anonymous words. To “scratch dirt over scandal for money” makes dirt a cover; to “exhume it to the winds” turns rumor into something dug up and flung outward. The closing lines are deliberately ugly: the editor lies near “the sewage” that flows from the village, among “empty cans and garbage” and “abortions” that are hidden. His whole career was spent deciding what to cover and what to expose, and now he is buried among what the town wants to forget.
The poem matters because it turns an epitaph into a moral X-ray. Whedon calls his readiness to be “on every side” a professional skill, but Masters shows it as a refusal to have a real position, a willingness to profit from scandal and revenge. The speaker is dead, so he no longer needs to lie. That makes “Editor Whedon” feel less like a period piece about an old newspaper office and more like a warning about anyone who turns public words into weapons while hiding behind a platform.