The Open Sea

Edgar Lee Masters turns history into searing drama, tracing the fates of Brutus, Antony, Cleopatra, Caesar, Charlotte Corday, Lincoln, and John Wilkes Booth through voices charged with irony, grief, and moral doubt. In Rome, Antony's lavish love for Cleopatra unfolds against the collapse of empire, where pleasure, loyalty, and public duty become inseparable from ruin. Masters deepens the tragedy by defending Antony's richness of spirit while questioning Brutus's supposedly noble act and Shakespeare's shaping of Caesar into a patriotic villain. The later poems widen into revolutionary violence and modern assassination, as Charlotte Corday and Booth justify murder in the name of truth, liberty, or union. Against their self-dramatizing certainties, Lincoln appears serene, humane, and prophetic at Ford's Theatre, speaking of peace even as Booth closes in. Throughout, Masters probes the costs of idealism, ambition, and renunciation, showing how great historical figures are both enlarged and destroyed by the passions they serve. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.