Faith & Spirit Quote by Edgar Lee Masters

A gentle accusation hides inside Masters's question: if you want a spacious soul, you have to earn it with a spacious life. The line is phrased as inquiry, but it lands like a verdict on the popular hope that inner grandeur can be willed into existence without the messy evidence of how one actually lived. Masters is suspicious of the after-the-fact makeover, the idea that depth is a private possession rather than a public record.

The subtext is almost prosecutorial. "How shall" isn't curiosity; it's cross-examination. The measure of a person isn't their self-story, their late-blooming piety, or the eloquence of their regrets, but the footprint of their choices: whom they loved, what they endured, what they risked, what they refused. By making "soul" answerable to "life", Masters collapses the comforting gap between identity and behavior. Spiritual aspiration becomes inseparable from biography.

Context matters. Masters wrote in the shadowy moral theater of Spoon River Anthology, where the dead speak with the clarity the living often avoid. Those epitaph-voices are full of rationalizations, grievances, and sudden honesty; the book is basically a community autopsy. In that world, the "soul" is not a metaphysical escape hatch but a ledger revealed when the talking stops.

The line also carries a democratic sting. No one gets a bigger soul by claiming it. You get it the old-fashioned way: by living in ways that widen you, even when widening hurts.