Edwin Arlington Robinson

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Edwin Arlington Robinson Poetry: American Poets Analysis

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In response to a 1931 letter from Bess Dworsky, who was preparing a thesis on Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “philosophy,” the poet wrote: “I am rather sorry to learn that you are writing about my ’philosophy’—which is mostly a statement of my inability to accept a mechanistic interpretation of the universe and of life.” Critics have called Robinson an idealist, a Platonist, a transcendentalist, a pantheist, and many combinations thereof. Although it is indeed possible to identify in his poetry some elements of all the above, he was not an advocate of any philosophical system. He was most assuredly aware of the scientific and philosophical concepts that pressed toward a “mechanistic interpretation of the universe and of life,” which he rejected in favor of a personal idealism that nonetheless accepted the reality of matter. As Chard Powers Smith argues in Where the Light Falls: A Portrait of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1965), “He never denied the material world. What he did was to face it, defy it, and deny its capacity to destroy him.” Against the forces of materialism, he posited a life of the mind, and, as Smith suggests, “He respected the unique inner integrity of all individuals and he never judged anyone, in life or in fiction [poetry], for he did not know what pressures they had been under.”

Several comments that Robinson made serve to illustrate his purpose in writing poetry and provide us with external evidence that, coupled with the internal evidence of the poems themselves, identifies his major thematic concerns. In a letter to Harry de Forest Smith, dated May 13, 1896, Robinson said what he hoped his poems would do:If printed lines are good for anything, they are bound to be picked up some time; and then, if some poor devil of a man or woman feels any better or any stronger for anything that I have said, I shall have no fault to find with the scheme or anything in it.

Writing to Smith again in February 3, 1897, Robinson reaffirmed his position: “I also make free to say that many of my verses [were] written with a conscious hope that they might make some despairing devil a little stronger and a little better satisfied with things—not as they are, but as they are to be.” Sixteen years later, in reply to William Stanley Braithwaite’s inquiry about his central “message,” Robinson is reputed to have answered in terms remarkably consistent with his statements made years earlier:I suppose that a part of it might be described as a faint hope of making a few of us understand our fellow creatures a little better, and to 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.

Although this response may sound as if Robinson had embraced the philosophical determinism of the naturalistic writers, Robinson was quick to correct that impression: “If a reader doesn’t get from my books an impression that life is very much worth while, even though it may not seem always to be profitable or desirable, I can only say that he doesn’t see what I am driving at.”

From The Torrent and the Night Before to Dionysus in Doubt , the last volume to contain significant shorter poems, the dual concept of understanding and compassion, Robinson’s major thematic concern, is strongly evident in such outstanding poems as “Luke Havergal,” “The Clerks,” “The Growth of ’Lorraine,’” “The Whip,” “How Annandale Went Out,” “Flammonde,”...

(This entire section contains 3484 words.)

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“The Gift of God,” “Veteran Sirens,” “The Poor Relation,” “En Passant,” and “Eros Turannos.” Very closely aligned to the motif of understanding and compassion is the belief exemplified in many of his poems, and most convincingly so in “Eros Turannos,” that no one person is ever able to fully understand another person. Although this may seem incompatible with Robinson’s preoccupation with understanding and compassion, it is not, for the poet believed that the very act of trying to understand is of extreme value in itself.

Imagery, irony, and obscurity

In terms of technique—other than the conventions of rhyme and meter—Robinson works consistently in three areas worth noting: image patterns, irony, and the deliberate withholding of information. Robinson is not the New England poet who celebrates or even writes about snow, lilacs, or the like. In fact, he is lean in his use of imagery from the natural world; however, when he does draw on the natural world, his images are functional, not decorative, and they are often framed in a metaphorical or symbolic context. Wherever his images come from—colors, a visionary light, water, leaves, to name a few sources—they often serve in patterns as ordering devices to provide unity and to enhance meaning. They contribute to the complex texture of some of his best poems, such as “Luke Havergal,” “For a Dead Lady,” and “Eros Turannos.”

Irony is one of Robinson’s most consistently employed tools, and he uses it in different ways to achieve various ends. In “How Annandale Went Out,” for example, irony is situational and understated; the doctor-speaker feels that it is absurd in the first place that he is on trial for a justified mercy killing, and he pleads his case almost casually. In “The House on the Hill” and “Eros Turannos,” Robinson is overtly caustic in his attitude toward people who feel compelled to speculate on the circumstances and personalities of others without much in the way of verification. In “The Man Against the Sky,” the concept of a mechanistic universe is soundly indicted, while in “Cassandra,” sarcasm is leveled, not very subtly, at American materialism. In “New England,” the irony is so complex that readers first thought the sonnet was an attack on the rigidity of the Puritan afterglow in New England, when the poem actually denounces those who have wrongly interpreted this region.

Although poets such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens provide what amount to acceptable puzzles in their poetry, Robinson was, for a period, the object of some scorn for his obscurity. Because he was not given to the esoteric, readers perhaps came to him expecting to find neat, rational answers in technically sound poems. Because his language is relatively uncomplicated, descending probably from the Puritan “plain style,” readers were confounded and even angered at not being able to determine what some of his poems meant. These interpretive problems derive from Robinson’s technique of deliberately withholding information in the poem to make readers think, to reward them when they arrive at their own understanding.

“Eros Turannos”

The most accomplished of Robinson’s shorter poems, “Eros Turannos” is the favorite of anthologists and the poem most representative of Robinson’s major thematic concerns and techniques. Set in a village on the coast of Maine, it recounts the courtship of a man and woman, and then tries to explain what happened to the woman once the man died. The speaker of the poem takes deliberate pains to inform the reader that he is really failing to understand her situation because he actually does not know what, in fact, she is experiencing.

The poem consists of six stanzas of eight lines each, with an ababcccb rhyme scheme and a metrical pattern of iambic tetrameter for all lines except those ending with the b rhyme. These are indented in the text and are in iambic trimeter with one extra unaccented syllable at the end of the line. The title is Greek for “Love, the Tyrant.”

At the outset of this poem, which is narrated in the present tense to give its dramatic situation a sense of immediacy, the reader learns that the woman is afraid of the man despite his “engaging mask,” that she has just cause for discounting him as a potential husband, but that she is willing to disregard her fears and uncertainties about him because she is more afraid of the “downward years,” of growing old alone. Her insecurity is not merely a product of her relationship with the man: Rather, it is a component of her personality—she is simply afraid of life.

As “Eros Turannos” progresses to the close of the third stanza, which marks the end of the first part of this little drama, the woman is depicted as being once capable of penetrating with her “blurred sagacity” beneath his mask to the “Judas that she found him”; however, she finally relinquishes all objections, at whatever cost to her, and agrees to the union. So far, the reader may feel that the woman deserves pity, and the man, scorn; but in typical Robinson fashion, the situation is not that simple, for just as the woman has deliberately deceived herself into believing that marrying a man she fears and cannot trust is a lesser evil than growing old alone, so too has he been deceived into marriage by the prospect of living rather comfortably with her in a setting replete with tradition that “Beguiles and reassures him.” Robinson adopts the stance that there are inevitably two sides to every story, and he is most reluctant to pass judgment. There are some exceptions, of course, such as the despicable Aaron Stark in the sonnet of that name. By and large, however, if judgment is to be passed, the reader must do so from whatever understanding he comes to in the poems. Almost always, the reader learns to have compassion once he understands the situations confronting the characters, their personal inadequacies or hells—or understands at least to the best of his ability.

The first three stanzas thus establish and resolve, for a time, the problems facing the man and the woman by having them marry. The husband is absent in the second part of the poem, the last three stanzas, and the wife is living alone. From the way she is described in the first four lines of the fourth stanza, it is evident that a considerable time has passed and that she is either in or rapidly approaching old age. In addition, she is suffering from a collapse of her mental faculties. The “pounding wave” repeats the same song: her husband’s dirge. The word “illusion” refers to the speaker’s conception of the manner in which the wife had viewed her husband who now is dead. Her fears of living alone in the “downward years” have materialized. Hiding from the world, she has become an object of curiosity and idle speculation among the Tilbury Town folk.

At the beginning of the fifth stanza, the speaker, who, in Robinson’s characteristic manner, identifies himself as a townsman by the use of “we,” comments ironically on the inability of people to know other people and on the penchant “we” have for gossiping. Yet, just as the use of the words “veil” and “visions” reinforces the illusory nature of the wife’s assessment of her husband, so do the townspeople fall prey to illusions; they are mistaken in their conception of the “home, where passion lived and died,” in their conjectures about the man and woman who enacted the drama. The point that Robinson insists on making is a familiar one in his poetry.

The opening lines of the final stanza state that whatever the townspeople are saying can do the wife no harm, for she has striven with a “god” and is oblivious to everything else. She made a lifelong commitment, not only to her husband, but to “Love, the Tyrant,” as well, and she is living with—suffering—the consequences. Exactly “what the God has given” to her is unknown, but in his effort to approximate what he thinks it might be, the speaker formulates three similes. Because he is uncertain, he uses the words “though” and “or” to qualify his perceptions. Although critics uniformly admire the striking images that close the poem, they avoid commentary on what the images mean, preferring instead vaguely to call attention to their symbolic significance. Confusing as these images may be, they represent to the speaker his conception of the woman’s mental death, which is what she finally received from the “god,” “Love, the Tyrant,” once her husband died. When waves break (the first image), they are finished, through, dead; the “changed familiar tree” (the second image) is a tree in autumn, its leaves going or gone, and a symbolic representation of death or impending death; and, lastly, the blind who are driven down “the stairway to the sea” suggest the “downward years” of the first stanza and serve as the concluding representation of death. Blindly driven by “Love, the Tyrant,” the wife is being driven to death, just as the blind would drown were they forced into the sea. Words referring to vision and sight form a basic image pattern that unifies the poem and underscores the thematic concern: stanza (1) “mask”; (2) “blurred,” “sees,” “looks”; (3) “sees,” “dimmed”; (4) “illusion”; (5) “veil,” “vision,” “seen”; (6) “blind.” Although not explicitly related to the motif, a second pattern of imagery also helps unify the poem. Because the physical setting is a harbor community, water and nautical imagery is found in the infinitives “to sound” and “to secure,” and in the mention of “foamless weirs,” “sense of ocean,” “pounding wave,” “waves breaking,” and “like a stairway to the sea.” Finally, in keeping with the time of year in the second part of the poem, Robinson refers to the autumnal images of a “falling leaf” and “a changed familiar tree.” Robinson is at his best in “Eros Turannos,” a moving lyric unified through patterns of imagery, through the consistent use of the present tense, and through a logically balanced structure dividing the poem into cause and effect. It is through the speaker’s struggles to understand the wife that the reader comes to an understanding of and compassion for her.

“The Whip”

In both “The Whip” and “How Annandale Went Out,” as in “Eros Turannos,” Robinson withholds from the reader an easy understanding of the central issues of the poems, thus forcing the reader to a scrupulous reading. When the reader does become aware of the circumstances behind the actions of the characters, he understands and feels compassion for them. Both poems, but especially “The Whip,” have been the subject of considerable critical attention.

“The Whip,” a forty-line poem in five stanzas of eight iambic trimeter lines with an ababbcbc rhyme scheme, is narrated by a Tilbury Townsman who has no obvious connection with the characters whose recent drama, which led to a suicide, he is trying to fathom. The setting is apparently a funeral home. The victim is in an open coffin and the speaker quizzically addresses him.

In the first stanza, the speaker reveals that the suicide victim had been married to a woman who treated him tyrannically and ruined him. During their marriage, he constantly doubted her fidelity and became a cynic. As the poem progresses through the second and third stanzas, the speaker comments that the wife indeed had taken a lover and left. As a result, the husband chose death by drowning. Yet the speaker, recognizing that “the gall we drink/ Is not the mead we cry for,” feels that the husband’s plight did not justify his suicide. It was not “a thing to die for.”

The specifics surrounding the suicide begin to take shape in the fourth stanza as the speaker, still bewildered by the situation, notices a blue mark “like a welt” on the husband’s face; and in the final stanza, the speaker and the reader come to understanding at the same time. The “chase” referred to in the fifth stanza involved the husband on a horse pursuing the wife and her lover, who were either on one horse or on separate ones. As they were crossing a river, the wife struck her husband in the face with her riding crop; hence the title, “The Whip.” He fell off his horse and chose to drown. Earlier in the poem, knowing only that the husband committed suicide, the speaker asks, “Then, shall I call you blind?” He ends the poem with “Still, shall I call you blind?”—a question rhetorically posed, for the speaker has come to the realization that the husband’s suicide came at a moment of emotional and physical frenzy. This knowledge finally becoming clear to him, his attitude undergoes a change.

“The Whip” is a little masterpiece of mystery and subsequent revelation. It is a testimony to Robinson’s skill that he manages to have both the speaker and the reader simultaneously come to the realization of what actually happened. One of many in his repertoire of shorter poems devoted to the subject of suicide (others include “Luke Havergal,” “Richard Cory,” “The Growth of ’Lorraine,’” and “The Mill”), its thematic concerns are typically Robinson’s: the interdependence of understanding and compassion and the difficulty of knowing another person. Robinson wants us to understand the factors that lead to suicide and to have compassion for the victims. It should be remembered that, in Robinson’s time, suicide was looked on much more harshly and with much less understanding of the causal factors than it is today.

“How Annandale Went Out”

“How Annandale Went Out” is an English sonnet in which Robinson once again deliberately withholds information to make the impact of the poem more powerfully felt. It is also one of his sonnets that expands the range of the form by dealing with euthanasia, hardly the stuff of which sonnets were made before the twentieth century.

The doctor-speaker of the sonnet, which is entirely enclosed in quotation marks, is presenting the court with his reasons, however obliquely stated, for committing euthanasia in the case of Annandale, a man whose illness or injury, never identified, had reduced him from a man to a thing. The doctor refers to him in the octet as “it,” “apparatus,” and “wreck,” terms that initially misdirect the reader but that establish the doctor’s frame of mind. The doctor calls himself “Liar, physician, hypocrite, and friend” and, in the sestet, asks the court to bear in mind that he knew Annandale before misfortune reduced him to a “ruin.” In addition, he asks the court to remember the “worst you know of me” and to consider his position with “a slight kind of engine,” which probably refers to a hypodermic needle, the instrument with which he committed the mercy killing. He closes by saying, “You wouldn’t hang me? I thought not.”

This poem works so well because of the doctor’s view that the entire situation of the trial is nothing less than ironic. “It is absurd,” he seems to be saying, “that, given the circumstances, I should do anything other than put an end to the terrible suffering of my friend. This trial mocks the very humanitarian impulse in man.” The power of the poem resides in the doctor’s method of presentation. His ironic indictments, coupled with the very serious nature of the situation, generate tension, and by not identifying the source of Annandale’s suffering, Robinson places the focus clearly on the doctor.

Arthurian poems

It is possible that Robinson’s frustrations in not being able to write successful plays or fiction led him to expend the effort that he did on his long blank-verse narrative poems. They may have satisfied his need to tell a story, to dramatize at length what he so nicely accomplished in his shorter poems. The longer works, like the shorter poems, are full of troubled characters from all walks of life. In detailed observation that often is tedious and conversations that are often lifeless, Robinson presents characters on the verge of or just after a trauma. Critics have observed that Robinson’s concern in the long poems is the same as in the short poems in that he seeks to have the characters understand one another and themselves.

Because Merlin, Lancelot, and Tristram are based, however loosely at times, on the myths that constitute the Arthurian legends, they must necessarily deal with formed characters, events, and eventualities. Although the characters are troubled, they court and reach disaster, and they must gain understanding.

Yvor Winters, in Edwin Arlington Robinson (1946), remarks of Lancelot in the poem of that name: “[He] is not free, because of the Light; that is, because he has acquired understanding which he before had lacked, and of understanding one cannot divest oneself.” With some exceptions understandably made for the Arthurian poems, Robinson’s characters, whether in the longer poems or in the superior shorter ones, are often the maimed, the outcast, and the forgotten of society. Although many are able to endure their situations stoically, others cannot and, as a result, choose antisocial behavior. For all, the poet has compassion, and he asks that of his readers, too.

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Edwin Arlington Robinson American Literature Analysis

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