“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot (1915)

A kind of companion piece to the story of George Gray, Eliot’s Prufrock codified the anxieties of a middle-aged man apart, terrified of the implications of actually pursuing his dreams. Given their proximate composition dates, published within months of each other, the two poems suggest the Prufrock character is a type that Eliot and Masters’ restless generation found not only intriguing but representative as a cautionary figure: See the Prufrock, but don’t be the Prufrock.

“Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson (1862)

Masters doesn’t laugh much. His dissection of the residents of Spoon River is reminiscent of Poe (a poet Masters admired): heavy, gloomy, and forbidding. A kind of snarky variation on a poem in which the speaker addresses the reader from the grave, the Dickinson poem compares to Masters’ because of its self-deprecating levity and its use of subtle irony as a way to deflate the somber import of death. Dickinson’s jaunty rhythm, which mimics the steady gallop of a horse-drawn hearse, creates a comic effect that allows the speaker what Masters’ speaker is so denied: the sly wit of irony.