SOURCE: “A Grave and Solitary Voice: An Appreciation of Edwin Arlington Robinson,” in Irving Howe: Selected Writings 1950-1990, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1990, pp. 229-239.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1970, Howe praises what he considers sincerity and honesty in Robinson's poetry and discusses his lack of appeal among modern readers.]

The centennial of Edwin Arlington Robinson passed—he was born on December 22, 1869—with barely a murmur of public notice. There were a few academic volumes of varying merit, but no recognition in our larger journals and reviews, for Robinson seems the kind of poet who is likely to remain permanently out of fashion. At first, thinking about this neglect, I felt anger, since Robinson seems to me one of the best poets we have had in this country. But then I came to see that perhaps it doesn't matter whether the writers we most care about receive their “due.” Writers like Robinson survive in their work, appreciated by readers who aren't afraid to be left alone with an old book.

Robinson himself would hardly have expected any other fate, for he was not the sort of man to make demands on either this world or the next. Shy of all literary mobs, just managing to keep afloat through a mixture of stoicism and alcohol, he lived entirely for his poetry. Most of the time he was poor, a withdrawn and silent bachelor. He wrote “too much,” and his Collected Poems, coming almost to fifteen hundred crowded pages, has a great deal of failed work. But a small portion is very fine, and a group of fifteen or twenty poems unquestionably great.

This, to be sure, is not the received critical judgment—though a few critics, notably Conrad Aiken in some fine reviews of the 1920s and Yvor Winters in a splendid little book published in 1946, have recognized his worth. The public acclaim of a Robert Frost, however, Robinson could never hope to match; the approval of the avant-garde, when it came at all, came in lukewarm portions, since T. S. Eliot had declared his work to be “negligible” and that, for a time, was that. Robinson stood apart from the cultural movements of his day, so much so that he didn't even bother to oppose literary modernism: he simply followed his own convictions. He was one of those New England solitaries—great-grandsons of the Puritans, nephews of the Emersonians—whose lives seem pinched but who leave, in their stolid devotion to a task, something precious to the world.

The trouble in Robinson's life was mostly interior. Some force of repression, not exactly unknown to New England character, had locked up his powers for living by, or articulating openly, the feelings his poems show him to have had. Even in the poems themselves a direct release of passion or desire is infrequent; they “contain,” or emerge out of, enormous depths of feeling, but it is a feeling pressed into oblique irony or disciplined into austere reflection. He was not the man to yield himself to what Henry James called “promiscuous revelation.”

Among his obsessive subjects are solitude and failure, both drawn from his immediate experience and treated with a richness of complication that is unequaled in American poetry. For the insights Robinson offered on these grim topics, in poems such as “The Wandering Jew” and “Eros Turannos,” he no doubt paid a heavy price in his own experience. But we should remember that, finally, such preoccupations are neither a regional morbidity nor a personal neurosis: they are among the inescapable themes of literature. In his own dry and insular way, Robinson shared in the tragic vision that has dominated the imagination of the West since the Greek playwrights. By the time he began to write, it had perhaps become impossible for a serious poet to compose a tragedy on the classical scale, and as a result his sense of the tragic, unable to reach embodiment in a large action, had to emerge—one almost says, leak through—as a melancholy contemplativeness.

At the age of twenty-two, Robinson could already write, half in wisdom and half in self-defense, sentences forming an epigraph to his whole career: “Solitude … tends to magnify one's ideas of individuality; it sharpens his sympathy for failure where fate has been abused and self demoralized; it renders a man suspicious of the whole natural plan, and leads him to wonder whether the invisible powers are a fortuitous issue of unguided cosmos. …”

Like Hawthorne and Melville before him, Robinson came from a family that had suffered both a fall in circumstances and a collapse of psychic confidence. To read the reliable biography by Herman Hagedorn is gradually to be drawn into a graying orbit of family nightmare, an atmosphere similar to that of a late O'Neill play. Tight-lipped quarrels, heavy drinking, failing investments, ventures into quack spiritualism and drugs—these were the matter of his youth. Hagedorn describes the few months before the death of the poet's father: The elder Robinson's “interest in spiritualism had deepened and, in the slow disintegration of his organism, detached and eerie energies seemed to be released. There were table rappings and once the table came off the floor, ‘cutting my universe … clean in half’. … Of these last months with his father, he told a friend, ‘They were a living hell.’”

Not much better were Robinson's early years in New York, where he slept in a hall bedroom and worked as a subway clerk. He kept writing and won some recognition, including help from President Theodore Roosevelt, who was impressed by one of Robinson's (inferior) poems but had the honesty to admit he didn't understand it. Toward the end of his career Robinson scored his one commercial success with Tristram, the least interesting of his three lengthy Arthurian poems. This success did not much affect his life or, for that matter, his view of life. He died in 1935, a victim of cancer. It is said that as Robinson lay dying one of his hangers-on approached him for a small loan: life, as usual, trying to imitate art.

2

The imprint of New England on Robinson's sensibility is strong, but it is not precise. By the time he was growing up in the river-town of Gardiner, Maine (the Tilbury Town of his poems), Puritanism was no longer a coherent religious force. It had become at best an ingrained and hardened way of life surviving beyond its original moment of strength. Yet to writers like Hawthorne and Robinson, the New England tradition left a rich inheritance: the assumption that human existence, caught in a constant inner struggle between good and evil, is inherently dramatic. It also left the habit of intensive scrutiny, at once proud and dust-humble, into human motives. Writers like Hawthorne and Robinson were no longer believers but since they still responded to what they had rejected, they found themselves in a fruitful dilemma. They did not wish entirely to shake off the strict moralism of the New England past; yet they were fascinated by the psychological study of behavior that would come to dominate twentieth-century literature and, meanwhile, was both a borrowing from nineteenth-century European Romanticism and a distillation of Puritan habits of mind. The best of the New England writers tried to yoke these two ways of regarding the human enterprise, and if their attempt is dubious in principle, it yielded in practice a remarkable subtlety in the investigation of motives. As for Emersonianism, by the time Robinson was beginning to think for himself it was far gone in decay, a mist of genteel idealism.

Robinson borrowed from both traditions. His weaker poems reveal an Emersonian yearning toward godhead and transcendence, which is an experience somewhat different from believing in God. His stronger poems share with the Puritans a cast of mind that is intensely serious, convinced of the irreducibility of moral problems, and devoted to nuance of motive with the scrupulosity his grandfathers had applied to nuance of theology. Even in an early, unimpressive sonnet like “Credo,” which begins in a dispirited tone characteristic of much late-nineteenth-century writing,

I cannot find my way: there is no star
In all the shrouded heavens anywhere

Robinson still felt obliged to end with an Emersonian piety:

I know the far-sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the Light.

Whenever that “Light” begins to flicker, so tenuous a symbol for the idea of transcendence, it is a sure sign of trouble in Robinson's poems. A straining toward an optimism in which he has no real conviction, it would soon be overshadowed, however, by Robinson's darkening fear, as he later wrote in a long poem called King Jasper, that

                                                  No God,
No Law, no Purpose, could have hatched for sport
Out of warm water and slime, a war for life
That was unnecessary, and far better
Never had been—if man, as we behold him,
Is all it means.

Such lines suggest that Robinson's gift was not for philosophizing in verse; he was eminently capable of thinking as a poet, but mainly through his arrangement of dramatic particulars and casual reflections he wove in among them. What makes Robinson's concern with God and the cosmos important is not its doctrinal content, quite as vague and dispirited as that of other sensitive people of his time, but the way in which he would employ it as the groundwork for his miniature dramas.

It is an advantage for a writer to have come into relation with a great tradition of thought, even if only in its stages of decay, and it can be a still greater advantage to struggle with the problem of salvaging elements of wisdom from that decayed tradition. For while a culture in decomposition may limit the scope of its writers and keep them from the highest achievement, it offers special opportunities for moral drama to those who can maintain their bearing. The traps of such a moment are obvious: nostalgia, at one extreme, and sensationalism, at the other. Most of the time Robinson was strong enough to resist these temptations, a portion of the old New England steel persisting in his soul; or perhaps he could resist them simply because he was so entirely absorbed in his own sense of the human situation and therefore didn't even trouble about the cultural innovations of his time. He made doubt into a discipline, and failure into an opening toward compassion.

3

Many of Robinson's shorter poems—lyrics, ballads, sonnets, dramatic narratives—are set in Tilbury Town, his down-east locale where idlers dream away their lives in harmless fantasy, mild rebels suffer the resistance of a community gone stiff, and the tragedy of personal isolation seems to acquire a universal character. Other nineteenth-century writers had of course employed a recurrent setting in their work, and later, Faulkner would do the same with Yoknapatawpha County. Yet Robinson's use of Tilbury Town is rather different from what these writers do: he makes no attempt to fill out its social world, he cares little about details of place and moment, he seems hardly to strive for historical depth. Tilbury Town is more an atmosphere than a setting, it is barely provisioned, and it serves to suggest less a community than a lack of historical continuity. The foreground figures in these poems are drawn with two or three synoptic strokes, but Tilbury Town itself is shadowy, no longer able to bind its people. Robinson eyes it obliquely, half in and half out of its boundaries, a secret sharer taking snapshots of decline. He seems always to be signaling a persuasion that nothing can be known with certainty and the very thought of direct assertion is a falsehood in the making.

Some of these Tilbury pieces, as Robinson once remarked, have been “pickled in anthological brine.” Almost “everybody” knows “Miniver Cheevy” and “Richard Cory,” sardonic vignettes of small-town character, Yankee dropouts whose pitiable condition is contrasted—in quirky lines and comic rhymes—with their weak fantasies. These are far from Robinson's best poems, but neither are they contemptible. In the sketch of poor Miniver, who “loved the days of old,” there are flashes of cleverness:

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
                              That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
                              And Art, a vagrant.

Such pieces lead to better ones of their kind, such as the tautly written sonnets about Reuben Bright, the butcher who tears down his slaughterhouse when told his wife must die, and Aaron Stark, a miser with “eyes like little dollars in the dark.” My experience in teaching these poems is that students trained to flounder in The Waste Land will at first condescend, but when asked to read the poems again, will be unsettled by the depths of moral understanding within them.

The finest of Robinson's sonnets of character is “The Clerks.” Describing a return to Tilbury Town, the poet meets old friends, figures of “a shopworn brotherhood,” who now work as clerks in stores. The opening octet quietly evokes this scene, and then in the closing sestet Robinson widens the range of his observation with a powerful statement about the weariness of slow defeat:

And you that ache so much to be sublime,
And you that feed yourselves with your descent,
What comes of all your visions and your fears?
Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.

Without pretending to close analysis, I would like to glance at a few of the verbal refinements in these six lines. The opening “ache … to be sublime” has its workaday irony that prepares for the remarkable line which follows: to “feed” with “your descent” is a characteristic Robinsonian turn, which in addition to the idea of consuming oneself through age suggests more obliquely that indulgence in vanity which claims distinction for one's decline. Poets and kings who are “clerks of Time” are helplessly aligned with the Tilbury clerks, yet Robinson sees that even in the democracy of our common decay we cling to our trifle of status. For in the “dull webs of discontent” which from the fragile substance of our lives, we still insist on “tiering” ourselves. Coming in the penultimate line, the word “tiering” has ironic thrust: how long can a tier survive as a web? And in the concluding line Robinson ventures one of his few deviations from standard English, in the use of “alnage,” a rare term meaning a measure of cloth, that is both appropriate to the atmosphere of waste built up at the end and overwhelming as it turns us back to the “shop-worn” clerks who are Robinson's original donnée.

Now for readers brought up in the modernist tradition of Eliot and Stevens, these short poems of Robinson's will not yield much excitement. They see in such poems neither tangle nor agony, brilliance nor innovation. But they are wrong, for the Tilbury sonnets and lyrics do, in their own way, represent a significant innovation: Robinson was the first American poet of stature to bring commonplace people and commonplace experience into our poetry. Whitman had invoked such people and even rhapsodized over them, but as individuals with warm blood they are not really to be found in his pages. Robinson understood that “even the happy mortals we term ordinary or commonplace act their own mental tragedies and live a far deeper and wider life than we are inclined to believe possible. …”

The point bears stressing because most critics hail poets like Eliot and Stevens for their innovations in metrics and language while condescending toward Robinson as merely traditional. Even if that were true, it would not, of course, be a sufficient reason for judgments either favorable or hostile; but it is not true. Robinson never thought of himself as a poetic revolutionary, but like all important poets, he helped enlarge for those who came after him the possibilities of composition.

His dramatic miniatures in verse—spiritual dossiers of American experience, as someone has nicely called them—remind one a little of Hawthorne, in their ironic undercurrents and cool explorations of vanity, and a little of James, in their peeling away of psychic pretense and their bias that human relationships are inherently a trap. Yet it would be unjust to say that Robinson was a short-story writer who happened to write verse, for it is precisely through traditional forms—precisely through his disciplined stanzas, regular meters, and obbligatos of rhyme—that he released his vision. Robinson's language seldom achieves the high radiance of Frost, and few of his short poems are as beautifully complexioned as Frost's “Spring Pools” or “The Most of It.” But in Robinson there are sudden plunges into depths of experiences and then stretches of earned contemplativeness that Frost can rarely equal. Here, for example, is the octet of Robinson sonnet, “The Pity of the Leaves,” that deals with an experience—an old man alone at night with his foreboding of death—which in “An Old Man's Winter Night” Frost also treated memorably but not, I think, as well:

Vengeful across the cold November moors,
Loud with ancestral shame there came the bleak
Sad wind that shrieked and answered with a shriek,
Reverberant through lonely corridors.
The old man heard it; and he heard, perforce,
Words out of lips that were no more to speak—
Words of the past that shook the old man's cheek
Like dead remembered footsteps on old floors.

It is always to “the slow tragedy of haunted men” that Robinson keeps returning. One of his greatest lyrics on this theme, the kind of hypnotic incantation that happens to a poet once or twice if he is lucky, is “Luke Havergal”: a grieving man hears the voice of his dead love and it draws him like an appetite for death, quiet and enclosing.

The greatest of these Tilbury poems, and one of the greatest poems about the tragedy of love in our language, is “Eros Turannos.” Yvor Winters aptly calls it “a universal tragedy in a Maine setting.” It deals with a genteel and sensitive woman, advancing in years and never, apparently, a startling beauty, who has married or otherwise engaged herself to a charming wastrel with a taste for the finer things of life:

She fears him, and will always ask
                              What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
                              All reasons to refuse him. …

With a fierce concentration of phrase, the poem proceeds to specify the entanglements in which these people trap themselves, the moral confusions and psychic fears. The concluding stanza reaches a wisdom about the human lot such as marks Robinson's poetry at its best. Those, he writes, who with the god of love have striven,

Not hearing much of what we say,
                              Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
                              Where down the blind are driven.

Thinking of such poems and trying to understand how it is that in their plainness they can yet seem magnificent, one finds oneself falling back on terms like “sincerity” and “honesty.” They are terms notoriously inadequate and tricky, yet inescapable in discussing poets like Robinson and Thomas Hardy. It is not, after all, as if one wants to say about more brilliant poets like Eliot and Yeats that they are insincere or lacking in honesty; of course not. What one does want to suggest is that in poems like Robinson's “Eros Turannos” and “Hillcrest,” as in Hardy's “The Going” and “At Castle Boterel,” there is an abandonment of all pretense and pose, all protectiveness and persona. At such moments the poet seems beyond decoration and defense; he leaves himself vulnerable, open to the pain of his self; he cares nothing for consolation; he looks at defeat and does not blink.

4

Robinson was also a master of a certain genre poem, Wordsworthian in tone and perhaps source, which Frost also wrote but not, in my judgment, as well. These are poems about lost and aging country people, mostly in New England: “Isaac and Archibald,” “Aunt Imogen,” and “The Poor Relation.” The very titles are likely to displease readers whose hearts tremble before titles like “Leda and the Swan,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and “The Bridge.”

“Isaac and Archibald” is the masterpiece of this group, a summer idyll tinged with shadows of death, told by a mature man remembering himself as a boy who spent an afternoon with two old farmers, lifelong friends, each of whom now frets that the other is showing signs of decay. The verse is exquisite:

So I lay dreaming of what things I would,
Calm and incorrigibly satisfied
With apples and romance and ignorance,
And the still smoke from Archibald's clay pipe.
There was a stillness over everything,
As if the spirit of heat had laid its hand
Upon the world and hushed it; and I felt
Within the mightiness of the white sun
That smote the land around us and wrought out
A fragrance from the trees, a vital warmth
And fulness for the time that was to come,
And a glory for the world beyond the forest.
The present and the future and the past,
Isaac and Archibald, the burning bush,
The Trojans and the walls of Jericho,
Were beautifully fused; and all went well
Till Archibald began to fret for Isaac
And said it was a master day for sunstroke.

Another kind of poem at which Robinson showed his mastery, one that has rarely been written in this country, is the dramatic monologue of medium length. “Rembrandt to Rembrandt,” “The Three Taverns” (St. Paul approaching Rome), and “John Brown” are the best examples. The pitfalls of this genre are notorious: an effort to capture the historic inflections of the speaker's voice, so that both conciseness of speech and poetic force are sacrificed to some idea of verisimilitude; a tendency toward linguistic exhibitionism, blank verse as a mode of preening; and a lack of clear focusing of intent, so that the immediate experience of the speaker fails to take on larger resonance. Robinson mostly transcends these difficulties. He chooses figures at moments of high crisis, Rembrandt as he plunges into dark painting, St. Paul as he ruminates upon his forthcoming capture, and John Brown as he readies himself for hanging. The result is serious in moral perception, leading always to the idea of abandonment of the self, and dignified in tone, for Robinson had little gift for colloquial speech and was shrewd enough to maintain a level of formal diction.

It is Frost who is mainly honored for this kind of dramatic poem, but a sustained comparison would show, I think, the superiority of Robinson's work. Though not nearly so brilliant a virtuoso as Frost, Robinson writes from a fullness of experience and a tragic awareness that Frost cannot equal. Frost achieves a cleaner verbal surface, but Robinson is more abundant in moral detail and insight.

There remains finally a word to be said about Robinson's Arthurian poems, Merlin, Lancelot, and Tristram, the first two of which are very considerable productions. I am aware of straining my readers' credulity in saying that Merlin and Lancelot, set in the court of King Arthur and dealing with the loves and intrigues of his knights, are profound explorations of human suffering.

Tennyson's Idylls of the King, dealing with the same materials, is mainly a pictorial representation of waxen figures, beautiful in the way a tapestry might be but not gripping as drama. Robinson's Guinevere and Lancelot, however, are errant human beings separated from us only by costume and time; his Merlin is an aging man of worldly power and some wisdom who finds himself drawn to the temptations of private life. Long poems are bound to have flaws, in this case excessive talk and a spun-thin moral theorizing that can become tedious. And any effort at sustained blank verse will, by now, lead to padding and looseness of language. Still, these are poems for mature men and women who know that in the end we are all as we are, vulnerable and mortal. Here Merlin speaks at the close of his career, remembering his love:

                                                            Let her love
What man she may, no other love than mine
Shall be an index of her memories.
I fear no man who may come after me,
And I see none. I see her, still in green,
Beside the fountain. I shall not go back …
                                                            If I come not,
The lady Vivian will remember me,
And say: ‘I knew him when his heart was young,
Though I have lost him now. Time called him home,
And that was as it was; for much is lost
Between Broceliande and Camelot.’

In my own experience Robinson is a poet who grows through rereading, or perhaps it would be better to say, one grows into being able to reread him. He will never please the crowds, neither the large ones nor the small ones. All that need be said about Robinson he said himself in a sonnet about George Crabbe, the eighteenth-century English poet who also wrote about commonplace people in obscure corners of the earth:

Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.