Based on a selection of poems in Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology (1916), I mapped out the town of Spoon River following the protocols described by Franco Moretti in the "Maps" chapter of Graphs, Maps, and Trees. In terms of visualization, I wondered whether it would be productive to bring his "geometric" method back around to the "geographic." We can imagine the events, interactions, and locations of the town as a set of concentric circles around a middle point, and use these to construct a sort of phenomenal geography.

At the center is the town of Spoon River itself, where we find three spheres of action: Home, Public, and Commerce. In the Home, for example, the events we observe include: adultery, childbirth, sewing, contracting tetanus, reclusion, singing, an unsolved murder.

At the first circle outward from the town itself, we find nearby environs: a field, a river bank, a mine, a barren orchard, Miller's Ford. The field, for example, is site not only to hunting but also an accidental death by snake bite and an intentional murder by a jealous lover.

The second concentric circle moves beyond these bounds to the larger county. The visible landmarks are the county jail and the prison. Characters return from the prison after decades but at least one dies overnight in the jail.

At the outer-most circle, we find the larger world. There are a few different routes away from the town: the military, familial estrangement, and cosmopolitanism. Military service is tied to memory and a long view of history, since citizens of Spoon River had served in both the American Revolution and the Civil War. Moving to the big city, on the other hand, compresses space. Springfield, Chicago, New York, Paris, and Rome are each links in a chain of luxury, one leading to the next. In each case, the eye toward the larger world is mostly cast Eastward.