Edward Arlington Robinson
was a widely read and respected poet during his lifetime--he won three
Pulitzers--and we all know at least one of his poems, typically Miniver Cheevy
or Richard Cory, but his reputation slipped badly after his death. He
seems to have been the victim of having a foot in two different worlds.
On the one hand, he is one of the first literary figures to move from 19th
century sentimentalism to Modern themes of psychological despair and maudlin
realism. But, on the other hand, he wrote in rigid traditional forms,
expertly one might add. Thus, his subject matter was too bleak for the
practitioners of structured poetry, but the forms he wrote in were too hide
bound for the new generation of free form stylists. But as the selections
below show, he was a careful craftsman and his poems, while dark, are relieved
by a sort of mordant ironic humor. He deserves to be read, especially because
he demonstrated that modern themes and concerns could be addressed in classical
forms; it was not necessary to abandon rhyme
& meter, it was merely convenient.
The Modernist From Maine
have known and loved the
poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson for practically 50 years. When I was 14, his
poems seemed agreeably gloomy to me. His subjects are good-for-nothings,
nonstarters, weaklings. I liked how Robinson treated them -- archly,
satirically, harshly, just as I thought they deserved. And his poems were easy
to memorize, with their ineluctable meters and never-failing rhymes. Here's an
example, ''Reuben Bright,'' from ''The Children of the Night,'' published in
1897, when Robinson was 27:
Because he was a butcher
and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die,
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half that night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die,
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half that night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.
Robinson's places were gloomy too. Here's the
fragment of a cityscape from his autobiographical ''Old Trails (Washington
Square)'': ''And soon we found ourselves outside once more, / Where now the
lamps along the Avenue / Bloomed white for miles above an iron floor.'' The
lonesomeness of that last line finds its rural equivalent in ''The Dark
Hills'':
Dark hills at evening in
the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade -- as if the last of days
Were fading, and all wars were done.
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade -- as if the last of days
Were fading, and all wars were done.
The epitome of Robinson's gloom was the first of
his published poems, ''Luke Havergal,'' a summons to suicide. I didn't see that
while Robinson's subjects are gloomy, his poems are emphatically not. Writing
of first meeting Ezra Pound, in London in 1913, Robert Frost recalled how
Robinson was the first poet they talked about. ''I remember the pleasure with
which Pound and I laughed over the fourth 'thought' in 'Miniver thought, and
thought, and thought, / And thought about it.' ''That ''fourth made the
intolerable touch of poetry. With the fourth the fun began.''
Robinson's mordant long stories in verse also
had their appeal for me, telling of New England, of places I recognized. Like
Sarah Orne Jewett before him, Robinson wrote of Maine, his native state. He
spoke in a low American voice, and his stories were cast in a New England
light. With great charm, he was doing in verse what a whole generation of
American writers was doing in stories and novels, both before and just after
World War I: ''lodging a piece of the continent in the world's imagination,''
to borrow E. M. Forster's phrase about ''Main Street,'' by Sinclair Lewis.
Robinson's early life, in Gardiner, Me. (the
Tilbury Town of his poems), was remarkable for his dedication to the study and
practice of poetry. He showed a special affinity for difficult forms --
rondeau, sestina, villanelle. In 1891, at the age of 21, he went to Harvard,
and two years later, after the deaths of his father and mother, he left New
England for New York City (the Town Down the River of his poems). Here his
collection ''The Children of the Night'' was published, and from then on there
was no turning back from poetry. An unusual portent of his success occurred in
1905, when ''The Children of the Night'' was reviewed by President Theodore
Roosevelt. (Eight years late, but all the same!) Louise Bogan later called this
book ''one of the hinges upon which American poetry was able to turn from the
sentimentality of the 90's toward modern veracity and psychological truth.''
True, critical recognition came in 1916 for ''The Man Against the Sky,'' and in
1927 he was hailed by Mark Van Doren as the ''best of living American poets.''
Robinson went on to publish several more books after this. One was a best
seller; three won the Pulitzer Prize.
Robinson died in 1935, after which his
reputation took the usual post-mortem slide. Well, maybe not quite the usual
slide. It was his later works that were no longer read, those volumes that in
his lifetime had been so lavishly overpraised -- Arthurian romances in
monotonous blank verse, ill suited to an age still struggling with ''Prufrock.''
However, in 1946 Yvor Winters wrote a most discerning book about him;
Robinson's ''Collected Poems'' (1,498 pages!) remained in print until 1952; and
for decades after that, important critical voices were loud with Robinson's
praise. The modern consensus seemed to be that Edwin Arlington Robinson was a
top-notch American poet. And yet. . . .
In his 1980 ''Lives of the Modern Poets,''
William H. Pritchard declared that Robinson is a poet whose ''stock does not
stand very high at the moment and is not likely to rise.'' And when in 1988 PBS
broadcast its American poets series, ''Voices and Visions,'' Robinson wasn't
among the 13 poets chosen by Helen Vendler. Nor is he well represented in the
standard teaching anthologies. In some he is not represented at all. A similar
fate has befallen other grand American talents -- Marsden Hartley, for
instance. It may be that Robinson was undervalued because he excelled in
outmoded forms, especially in the Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet. His sonnets
differ sharply from the traditional English ones. They are more concise, more
purposeful, and constitute a defiant divide between English and American verse.
Robinson collected them in ''Sonnets, 1889-1927.'' They ought to be collected
again.
The new Modern Library edition of ''The Poetry
of E. A. Robinson'' should help his reputation. Its editor, Robert Mezey, has
made a good selection. He has also wisely appended the Frost article quoted
above, and he gives a generous sampling of other poets' opinions. Like Robert
Faggen, the editor of the Penguin ''Selected Poems'' of a couple of years ago,
Mezey concentrates on the shorter works because, as he explains, ''I believe
Robinson knew that the short poems were his great achievement, but he really
had no choice in the matter: they did not come any more, he said.'' Mezey also
quotes J. V. Cunningham: ''The professed poet must keep writing, 'scrivening to
the end against his fate' for it is the justification of his life. So he wrote
too much, and when written out he could not swear off.'' Mezey and his
publisher have worked hard to promote and provide for some of Robinson's best
work. But they omit a substantial portion of his stronger verse, making the
book less inclusive than the title implies. Perhaps in future editions they
might consider suppressing Mezey's notes in favor of more poetry.
One of Robinson's best-known poems is ''Eros
Turannos,'' a tragic novel-in-little consisting of six stanzas of eight lines
each. It goes straight to the heart and thrives there. His most uncanny poem is
undoubtedly ''The Sheaves.'' For its mystery, might and majesty it deserves to
be given in full, a suitable representative of this American master:
Where long the shadows of
the wind had rolled,
Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Like nothing that was ever bought or sold
It waited there, the body and the mind;
And with a mighty meaning of a kind
That tells the more the more it is not told.
Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Like nothing that was ever bought or sold
It waited there, the body and the mind;
And with a mighty meaning of a kind
That tells the more the more it is not told.
So in a land where all days
are not fair,
Fair days went on till on another day
A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,
Shining and still, but not for long to stay --
As if a thousand girls with golden hair
Might rise from where they slept and go away.
Fair days went on till on another day
A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,
Shining and still, but not for long to stay --
As if a thousand girls with golden hair
Might rise from where they slept and go away.
Ben
Sonnenberg is the author of ''Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad
Boy.''
