Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Robinson, Edwin Arlington - Marianne Moore (essay date 1924)

Marianne Moore (essay date 1924)

SOURCE: The Man Who Died Twice, in Dial, Vol. 77, August, 1924, pp. 168-70.

[In the following essay, Moore favorably reviews The Man Who Died Twice.]

Throughout Mr Robinson's work, one feels his admiration for “courage that is not all flesh recklessness.” This emphasis upon the predominance of the soul's conflicts over those of the intellect, is conspicuous in The Man Who Died Twice. A musician, gigantically endowed—who has “mistaken hell for paradise,” since he is not

… the sanguine ordinary
That sees no devils and so controls itself,
Having nothing in especial to control—

has died, but not completely. Brought back to life, he finds in moral triumph “more than he had lost,” and gives what is left of his reviving genius to those who have reclaimed him. An early friend descried him among

The caps and bonnets of a singing group
That loudly...

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