Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Robinson, Edwin Arlington - Donald Justice (essay date 1996)

Donald Justice (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: An afterword in The Torrent and The Night Before: A Facsimile Edition After 100 Years of his First Book, by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Tilbury House, Publishers, 1996,

[In the following essay, Justice broadly places Robinson and The Torrent and the Night Before in the context of modern American poetry.]

Looking back now, a century having passed, one sees and hears very clearly the dreadful sameness of the poetry Robinson encountered in the magazines of his youth, magazines Robinson himself could scarcely get a hearing in. The versification was competently banal, the diction was usually archaic or otherwise stilted, the subject matter was self-consciously poetical. Nor was this the worst that could be said of it. It was much then as it is today: only certain views, only certain feelings were felt to be proper for poetry. (Of course, our acceptable views differ vastly from those of a hundred...

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