Edgar Lee Masters published *Spoon River Anthology* in 1915, giving voices to the dead of a fictional Illinois town. The book is a series of epitaphs, plainspoken free-verse monologues in which former citizens confess secrets, nurse old grievances, and often contradict the respectability they wore in life. “Isa Nutter” belongs to that graveyard chorus, and its speaker uses his spectral last word to settle a domestic war.
Isa Nutter begins by quoting two contradictory diagnoses: “Doc Meyers said I had satyriasis, / And Doc Hill called it leucæmia.” But he dismisses both with a plain assertion: “I know what brought me here.” At sixty-four he felt as strong as a man of thirty-five or forty. The cause of his death, he insists, was not writing letters, late hours, jealousy, or even the strain of trying to understand Minnie. It was “the clamor of daughters and threats of sons, / And the sneers and curses of all my kin.” Those noisy verbs—clamor, threats, sneers, curses—turn family pressure into something physical and lethal. The family’s anger becomes an environment he cannot breathe in. He had to “sneak” to Peoria to marry Minnie, as if his own children had made love a crime. The poem’s central idea is that social and familial disapproval can destroy a person more surely than any disease. The real illness is the family’s moral outrage. The speaker’s final question, “why do you wonder my will was made / For the best and purest of women?”, is a triumphant jab at those relatives. The word “purest” may clash with the town’s view of a woman who had already had two husbands, but that is exactly the point: he redefines purity by love and loyalty, not by rumor.
The poem’s structure reinforces this defense. Masters uses free verse, with no regular rhyme or meter, so the lines move like speech—hesitating, listing, then turning. The lack of rhyme keeps the epitaph from sounding neat or decorative; it feels like a man thinking aloud after the funeral. The repeated phrase “And it wasn’t…” gathers possible explanations and brushes each one aside; the long list creates a rhythm of accumulation before the dash and the hard pivot: “It was none of these that laid me low— / But…” That turn is the emotional center. The clinical terms satyriasis and leucæmia sound like official verdicts, but the speaker’s plain language, “I know what brought me here,” undercuts them. The poem’s imagery is largely auditory and social: daughters clamoring, sons threatening, kin sneering and cursing. Peoria is not just a place; it is the far enough town, the escape hatch from watchful eyes. Minnie herself is described with tenderness—her “wonderful mind” and her “wretched life” with two earlier husbands. These phrases imply that the speaker has listened to her, sympathized, and judged her by her suffering rather than by scandal.
What makes “Isa Nutter” significant is its compact exposure of small-town hypocrisy. Masters gives the grave a moral authority that the living family lacks. The speaker’s will is both a legal document and a final act of rebellion: the man his kin tried to control gets the last word, and he spends it on Minnie. That turn is ironic and oddly satisfying. The final question’s direct address—“why do you wonder”—pulls the reader into the circle of those who doubted Minnie. The poem asks readers to consider who really deserves the label “pure”—the respectable relatives with their curses, or the woman with a difficult history who inspired devotion. In this way, a short graveyard monologue from 1915 remains a sharp little drama about love, gossip, and the power of a final will.