New Letters, Vol. 73 No. 1, 2006-07
When he died in 1935, Edwin Arlington Robinson reigned as the nation's leading poet. 
The New York Times called him "not only one of the finest poets of our time, but one who ranked with the great poets of the past." He was the only poet of his time and place, The Washington Evening Star observed, who could "be associated with the very greatest names in the history of letters." Other editorials called him the nation's "preeminent poet," our "most distinguished poet."
That was 1935. In the seventy years since then, Robinson's reputation has declined. (It could hardly have risen.) There was a flurry of attention during his centenary in 1969, and another in the 1990s, when three separate volumes of selected short-to-medium-length E.A.R. poems were published. Two of those books swiftly went out of print. In one of them, Robert Mezey characterized E.A.R.'s fall from favor as "a national disgrace." In the other, Donald Hall proclaimed that "[w]e must bring Robinson back. We must restore him to the American pantheon." This still remains to be done.
Robinson's timing could hardly have been worse. He started his career at the turn of the twentieth century, a period dominated by a choir of "gifted singers" – "tea-pot poets," in Whitman's phrase – who sang of incandescent twilights and castles in the air. Robinson would have none of it. He slaved over a sonnet called "The Clerks" that began:
I did not think that I should find them there
When I came back again; but there they stood,
As in the days they dreamed of when young blood
Was in their cheeks and women called them fair.
Nothing could be simpler or more elegant, but such lines were "rat poison" to editors expecting tinkling water and red-bellied robins. For eleven years, from 1894 to 1905, Robinson did not sell a single poem to a magazine. It would be another eleven before he began to get the recognition he deserved. During those long years of neglect, he skated close to the abyss of despair, with "ab-so-lute-ly nothing" but the bottle to sustain him.
In 1900, Robinson was a revolutionary poet in diction, subject matter, and attitude toward the pieties. He wrote about ordinary people and commonplace events in language stripped clean of archaisms. No one before his time would have thought it possible to compose sonnets about an honest butcher consumed with grief, about a miser with "eyes like little dollars in the dark," about ancient clerks in a dry goods store measuring out their days like bolts of cloth.
Very little of E.A.R.'s considerable corpus examines the natural world. Human beings interested him, not their surroundings. His best work looks closely at the people around him – one critic counted 233 "fully drawn characters" – exploring for secrets within. Time and again, he warns that we cannot really know others, that we do not even know ourselves. "Poetry is a language," as he put it, "that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said."
Robinson did not believe that poetry had to be difficult to matter. He did not set out to befuddle his readers. Yet he was often, and justly, charged with obscurity. Like Emerson and Dickinson before him, he practiced a gnomic style that mandated an extreme condensation of language. "Anything is improved by cutting," he believed.
Moreover, he would not put down what he did not know to be true. His fascination with people derived from awareness that their depths could not be sounded. This doctrine became for him an epistemological obsession. In presenting his gallery of subjects, he suggests, hints, and leaves clues for the right ones to discover in a happy collaboration toward a necessarily incomplete understanding. "Was ever an insect flying between two flowers / Told less than we are told of what we are?" one of his characters remarks.
For Robinson, those who confidently categorize their fellow human beings are worse than foolish – they are the enemy. In many of Robinson's poems, such people render their false and morally flawed materialistic judgments as a collective choral "we."
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread....
the last stanza of the ubiquitous "Richard Cory" begins, which sounds innocent enough until one takes account of the sacrilegious cursing of the bread. In "Eros Turannos," after making the town and harborside "Vibrate" with its gossip, the chorus casually excuses itself: "Meanwhile we do no harm...." Some of the obscurity in that great poem, as Donald Justice pointed out, is "expressive of the very understanding the poem is intended to carry." The truth "is held in suspension, unresolved: that itself is the resolution, the final truth."
Usually Robinson chose to investigate the derelict and downtrodden, the troubled and bereft: those who failed at life and love, those who led "scattered lives." Who wanted to read about successful aldermen, anyway? He introduced his cast in a voice manifestly his own. Archibald MacLeish called it "the after voice, the evening voice," and like that of most major writers, it was highly susceptible to parody.
Distinctive as Robinson was in these ways, he clung to traditional form all his career, crafting his earlier (and best) poems in rhyme and meter and in his late long poems moving on to blank verse while always eschewing free verse on the grounds that he wrote "badly enough as it is." And that was a second piece of bad timing, for when E.A.R. finally made his breakthrough, past fifty and past his prime (he won three Pulitzers from 1922 to 1927), he was widely regarded as insufficiently different and dazzling on the page, when compared to the modernist poets-Pound and Eliot and Stevens – then in their ascendancy.
The combative James Dickey, taking Robinson's cause as his own, observed in 1969 that Robinson's "considered, unhurried lines, as uncomplicated in syntax as they are difficult in thought," represented "a constant rebuke to those who conceive[d] of poetry as verbal legerdemain or," as Eliot called it, "as the 'superior amusement.'" But we do not need to knock down other great poets to make room for E.A.R. All we have to do is read him.
I first encountered Robinson in Prescott C. Cleveland's senior English class at The Blake School in Minneapolis a fast sixty years ago.
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,With the eight delicious stanzas about poor foolish Miniver, I was hooked. I didn't know a feminine ending from a transit of Venus, but could take pleasure in the double rhymes of stanzas five and six.
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the medieval grace
Of iron clothing.
Many years later I learned that Robert Frost and Ezra Pound, meeting in London in 1913, had slapped their knees in delight at the repetition in the penultimate stanza.
Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought and thought and thought,
And thought about it.
Frost was particularly pleased by the way that fourth "thought" popped up around the corner.
"Miniver Cheevy" is not really a typical Robinson poem. Lazy, impecunious, antiquarian, and alcoholic, Miniver has too many things wrong with him to warrant the kind of compassion E.A.R. usually felt for his characters. He is a figure of fun to laugh at, not someone to empathize with like, say, the wronged woman in "Eros Turannos" or the over-proud mother in "The Gift of God" or the solitary Eben Flood proposing a toast to himself. Robinson could make sport of Miniver as of few others, for in this portrait he was satirizing his own tendencies and inclinations, and even a down Maine New Englander was entitled to laugh at himself.
When W.S. Merwin was queried about Robinson, a more characteristic poem sprang to mind. During a June 2003 heat wave in Paris, the Pulitzer and Bollingen prizewinning Merwin was reading his poetry in a crowded upstairs room at the Village Voice bookshop in St.-Germain-des-Prés. With the windows open Merwin had to compete with traffic noise, but the ease of his manner and the grace of his verse commanded the attention of a sweaty audience.
Afterward, books were signed and questions asked. "Were you influenced by Robinson?" someone said. Without a second's hesitation, Merwin began reciting "Reuben Bright," one of E.A.'s best early sonnets.
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.
And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed. . . .Here Merwin stalled momentarily, looking for the rhyme, and the woman poet next in line to have her book signed spoke up to provide it.
. . . a lot of things that she had madeThat was all Merwin needed. He sailed on to the end, declaiming the final couplet in triumph.
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter house."Does that answer your question?" Merwin said.
"I don't expect recognition while I live," Robinson said early in his career, "but if I thought I could write something that would go on living after I'm gone, I'd be satisfied with an attic and a crust all my life." Eventually he had his share of earthly success, earning as much as "a good carpenter," but he was wary of terrestrial success. "If you will look in on me sometime in the summer of 2026," he wrote a friend on August 20, 1926, "I may be able to tell you whether my things are going to last." Only then might he be able to determine whether he had put the right words in the right order often enough – in Tom Stoppard's phrase – to "make [poems] which children will speak for you when you're dead." It seems to me, twenty years short of E.A.R.'s deadline, that he wrote at least thirty such poems.
For a man who never married, rarely traveled outside a northeastern triangle involving New York, Boston, and the MacDowell Colony, and did nothing to get his name in the paper, Robinson had his share of drama and disappointment. Most of the trouble began at home in Gardiner, Maine, where E.A.'s family collapsed around him as he was emboldening himself to pursue a life in poetry. The Robinsons' story resembled an O'Neill tragedy, the unkindest blows coming when his handsome and charismatic older brother Herman married the woman E.A. loved, lost the family fortune, and sank into alcoholism.
One might argue that this was a fortunate fall, confirming Robinson in his conviction that poetry was his calling and his strong suspicion, abetted by a reading of Henry James' "The Lesson of the Master," that a wife and family would probably get in the way. Toward the end of his life, people used to praise him for all the things he'd renounced for his art: home and family, comfort and contentment. That was nonsense, Robinson would answer. He counseled a would-be biographer to make it "clear to those people who say that I gave up great things to write poetry that there was only one thing in all the world I could give up": poetry itself.
As much as any seventeenth-century Puritan, he took the idea of his calling seriously. In order to justify his existence, he had to write poems. But they had to be poems that would do others some good. He brought up the subject time and again in his correspondence with friends.
May 1896, before publication of his first book: "if some poor devil feels any better or any stronger for something I have written, I shall have no fault to find with the scheme or anything in it."
May 1913, midway through his career but still awaiting recognition: "I suppose a part of [any message his work may impart] might be described as a faint hope of making a few of us understand our fellow creatures a little better, and realize what a small difference there is, after all, between ourselves, as we are, and ourselves, not only as we might have been but would have been if our physical and temperamental make-up and our environment had been a little different."
December 1920, summing up after publication of his Collected Poems: "Meanwhile I shall have brightened the way for a few groping wanderers without lanterns, and shall have comforted them with the assurance that, generally speaking, they haven't a damned thing to say about it. Somehow or other I suspect that my rather rickety existence has justified itself, but I don't recommend its equivalent to anyone else."
The image of "groping wanderers without lanterns" summons up Robinson's own time underground, when he worked as a timekeeper during construction of the New York subway in 1904. He took a number of short-term jobs early in the century to ward off starvation. He said he could draw a map showing every saloon in lower Manhattan that served free lunch to patrons. But even then, he had to plunk down a coin before the bartender would uncover the hard-boiled eggs or pickled herring.
In an attempt to earn his way through writing, Robinson flirted briefly with fiction and longer with the stage. It didn't work. The essential obliquity of his poems, leaving matters implied but unstated, did not transfer well to the novel, and would have sent theatergoers home scratching their heads. Don Marquis, the humorist who invented archy and mehitabel, attempted to convert Van Zorn – one of E.A.R.'s two published plays – into a commercial proposition, and gave it up as a bad job.
"To be a popular success," Marquis concluded, "it would have to be 'pointed up'... in its emotional possibilities; it would have to be broadened and its story slammed and punched home more. And that would be to destroy its peculiar excellence. Everything in it is done by suggestion, by inference, with restraint."
Always Robinson circled back to poetry as what he had been put on earth to do, even if there was precious little money in it. His Yankee reticence barred him from peripheral fields; he would not teach, he would not advertise, and he would not peddle his wares from a public platform. Robinson survived for most of the years between 1900 and 1919 on the generosity of benefactors. The most noteworthy of these was President Theodore Roosevelt. T.R. sent his sons to Groton, where in 1904 Kermit, the most literary of the boys, heard about E.A.R. from his English master Henry Howe Richards, himself a native of Gardiner, Maine. Kermit was taken with the poems, and concerned about the plight of the down-and-out man who wrote them. He dispatched a copy of The Children of the Night (1897) to the White House, importuning his father to do something on Robinson's behalf.
Robinson could accept financial support without guilt as an appropriate contribution to his calling as a poet. Besides, he gave freely to the friends who kept him going, and the friends who couldn't, whatever he could of his sympathy and understanding, affection and advice, and – when eventually he made some money of his own out of poetry – his pocketbook. He cared about his friends, as he did about all that was left of his family – Herman's widow Emma and her three daughters – back in Maine. He would not let a mosquito land on a friend's neck without taking action.
Robinson also had a knack for anticipating and untangling the most intricate of emotional complications. Time and again his insights helped relieve his friends in distress. When he died, a number of them insisted on his greatness as a man as well as a poet. This was unusual, for "most great artists are great only in their art," as one of them observed. Another thought E.A.R. the best man he had ever known.
Characteristically, he kept his friends in separate compartments. The companions of his youth and his two years at Harvard were unacquainted with the sophisticated and accomplished New Yorkers of his late years. The people he knew in Boston, and those he met during his twenty-four successive summers at the MacDowell Colony, fell into additional discrete categories. Not only that, but he made each of these friends feel that only to him or her had he truly revealed his innermost self.
After Robinson's death, this compartmentalization led to trouble. Louis Ledoux and Lewis Isaacs in New York, his official executors, ran up against a contingent of New Englanders who withheld their cooperation, their confidence, and their correspondence. There were family matters better not spoken of. How could anyone who did not know E.A. during his formative years possibly understand him?
What stopped me cold then – besides Cowley's counsel – was E.A.R.'s virtually unreadable handwriting. I made a trip to Maine, spent an entire day trying to figure out the contents of a single letter, and threw up my hands. Wallace L. Anderson, I knew, was working on what promised to become a several-volume edition of Robinson's letters. When they were published, I could come back to E.A.R. In the meantime I committed biographies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Cheever and MacLeish.
But the Robinson letters did not come out in print. Seven years ago, when the mortality tables made it clear that I could no longer put off writing about him, I made a couple of phone calls and discovered that Anderson's trove – he died in 1986 – was languishing in a Raynham, Massachusetts, warehouse. During twenty years labor Anderson had located more than 3,000 letters and acquired the Rosetta stone that enabled him to decode E.A.'s minuscule script. He was almost finished with the project at the time of his death, having transcribed all of the letters – wonderful! – and annotated most of them.
Further discussions ensued. In due course the Anderson family transferred the archive to the superlative Robinson collection at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, less than an hour from where the poet grew up.
Given splendid cooperation and access to the letters, I began to immerse myself in the life and work of Edwin Arlington Robinson. It took me seven years, and along the way I learned to value him as a man as well as a poet. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life will be my seventh literary biography. In none of the others did I invest so much time and energy and love.
The biography is the first book to tell the full story of Robinson's life and work. It will have succeeded to the extent that it sends readers back to his poems, where they will make Robinson partisans of anyone who reads them "one word after another."
About the Author
New Letters
Scott Donaldson's biography, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life is just out from Columbia University Press. His other biographies include Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (Overlook, 1999) and Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), winner of the 1993 Ambassador Book Award for biography. He is Louise G.T. Cooley Professor of English, emeritus, of the College of William and Mary in Virginia and has been a Fulbright senior lecturer in Finland and Italy, Bruern fellow at the University of Leeds in England, and a visiting fellow at Princeton. He lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, and San Diego.
Visit Scott Donaldson's web site....
University of Missouri-Kansas City
Editor: Robert Stewart
Administrative Director: Betsy Beasley
Editorial Assistant: Amy Lucas
Copyright © 2006
by The Curators of the Univerity of Missouri
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
