My Czech father-in-law took a lifelong delight in cemeteries. Even in his 90s, Jiri would lead me energetically through out-of-the-way Bohemian graveyards, where he read the tombstones as though they were the pages of books. “Look at this one,” he would exclaim, “she never thought she’d end up lying next to him!” He would chuckle with pleasure at the unseemly juxtaposition and then spring to another grave with the nimbleness of a fox. “Ah, yes,” he would whisper, “a tragic case. This was a famous historian who flung himself into the Vltava in 1945, at the end of the hostilities.” (Why at the end? I wondered. I’d have done it at the outset.) But Jiri never explained further. He glossed the epitaphs with his own commentaries as though adding footnotes to a misleading text.

I don’t know whether Jiri had ever read Edgar Lee Masters’s “Spoon River Anthology,” but he would have reveled in it. In this odd little classic, the dead give up their secrets, often of an unseemly sort: back-alley abortions, sexual abuse, suicide, even murder. Wives and husbands bicker, losers whine, the prosperous lay bare their dirty linen, even the good dead all too often have nasty truths to impart. It is as though, under the placid greensward of their final resting places, a whole village was abuzz with rumors, gossip, backbiting, and long-nourished grudges. Sometimes the disclosures are shocking, or would have been in 1915, when the book first appeared. Here is Julia Miller:

We quarreled that morning,
For he was sixty-five and I was thirty,
And I was nervous and heavy with the child
Whose birth I dreaded.

Julia, it turns out, has married an older man to conceal her pregnancy by another and decides to end it all:

Then I took morphine and sat down to read. Across the blackness that came over my eyes I see the flickering light of these words even now: ‘And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today thou shalt Be with me in paradise.’

By ending the poem with Christ’s words to the Good Thief on the cross, Masters makes plain that his sympathies are with Julia. This was daring at the time; it still carries a punch. And in fact, throughout the “Anthology,” it is clear – sometimes heavy-handedly so – that the author’s identification is almost always with the downtrodden, the outcast, the despised. For the rich and fortunate, pretty much without exception, he has only contempt.

In some of these scornful poems, Masters achieves an unexpected pathos. Take the case of “Granville Calhoun,” a county judge who is thrown out of office and who poisons himself and his sons with the bitterness of his loss; he suffers a stroke and asks:

Did my sons get power and money?
Did they serve the people or yoke them
To till and harvest fields of self?
For how could they ever forget
My face at the bedroom window,
Sitting helpless amid my golden cages
Of singing canaries,
Looking at the old courthouse?

Masters was not a great poet, but he hit upon a device of genius: to use the ancient form of the epitaph, as exemplified by the Greek anthology, to lay bare the secret life of a small Illinois town. The epitaph by its very terseness confers improbable grandeur on these dead, even the pettiest; they could be our neighbors and yet have an immemorial timbre to their voices.

From a literary viewpoint, “Spoon River Anthology” is curiously Janus-faced. In its bluff tone and unabashed candor, it harks back to Walt Whitman; the book could be an elaboration of his “Song of Occupations.” But it looks forward, too. It’s hard to imagine Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” without the precedent of Masters. Surely, too, William Carlos Williams, incomparably more skilled and sophisticated than Masters, must have seen the possibilities of the latter’s rough, blunt, unadorned verse with its devotion to mundane detail, not to mention its blaring “Americanness.”

“Spoon River Anthology” has always been in print but it has now appeared in a slim and elegant edition from Hesperus Press (246 pages, $12). The cover, adorned with the image of a winged skull from some old forgotten graveyard, is at once lowering and folksy and captures the spirit of the book to perfection.

I confess to a contradictory reaction to this “classic.” My more fastidious side recoils from the clunky lines Masters wielded, somewhat in the manner of a drunken mason slapping together an out-of-whack wall. But I also see that this very roughness adds to the cumulative power of the book. And Masters was astute. The often-plodding lines catch the voices of his personages; this, we realize, is the way they might have spoken. Eloquence would have jarred, like a corsage on a sow. Even so, Masters can surprise with sudden lyricism, as in “Dillard Sissman,” a flier of kites:

My kite is above the wind, Though now and then it wobbles, Like a man shaking his shoulders, And the tail streams out momentarily, Then sinks to rest. And the buzzards wheel and wheel, Sweeping the zenith with wide circles Above my kite.

Dillard sees the world from the perspective of his soaring kite, the farms, hills and forests and even “the thin moon,” and the view astonishes him; the poem ends, simply but beautifully, with the line “I am shaken as a banner.”

Every time I wince at some clodhopper stanza, I am also moved by something quintessentially American in the ensemble. This is a personal, not an aesthetic, response. Sometimes I’m annoyed by the characters. “Lucinda Matlock,” for example, has made me grit my teeth for years: that vast complacency, that shameless unbudgeable optimism she so blithely proclaims:

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent, and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you –
It takes life to love Life.

Call me degenerate, but I’d like to send Lucinda a loud raspberry when I read that. (Doesn’t she get CNN out on those prairies?) But a good part of my irritation comes from the shameful fact that I find myself, against my jaundiced will, responding to her optimism. This accounts for much of the “Anthology’s” power: These buried voices, despite unimaginable change over the intervening decades, still remain indelibly ours.