Edwin Arlington Robinson

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E. A. Robinson, A Voice Out of the Darkness

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SOURCE: “E. A. Robinson, A Voice Out of the Darkness,” in Literary Reflections, A Shoring of Images 1960-1993, Northeastern University Press, 1993, pp. 154-76.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1973, Lewis identifies Robinson as one of the key figures in American poetry of the period from 1890 to 1910.]

The period from about 1890 to 1910 is one of the hardest to define, and to appraise, in modern American literature. There was, on the one hand, a genuine vigor in the area of fiction—though one masterpiece, Billy Budd, remained unpublished until the late 1920s and another, Sister Carrie (1900), was, at the time of its publication, generally ignored. Still, Stephen Crane flared brilliantly, if briefly, and Henry James was passing through some of the ripest years of his career; Sarah Orne Jewett and other gifted women were writing quietly in various sections of New England. But the situation in poetry was a good deal murkier: to the literary historian, figures seem to loom in a kind of cultural fog and disappear; reputations are made overnight and as quickly forgotten. Out of this general darkness, the poetic voice that now comes through to us most clearly is that of Edwin Arlington Robinson.

Literary achievement is always to some extent a matter of luck: the luck, quite simply, to have been born at the right time—a time when one's vision coincides with a vocabulary sufficiently alive (and it is sometimes luckier to have at hand a vocabulary in partial decay) to convey that vision in an enduring manner, and when there is an audience equipped to grasp and respond to the vision. Jacques Maritain has spoken of Dante's great good luck in coming to maturity just as the medieval “synthesis,” fully realized in the work of the master theologians, became, on the eve of its dissolution, accessible to poetry. And about Emily Dickinson, Allen Tate has made a similar point: that as the formidable New England Protestant vision of human affairs began to dissolve, Emily Dickinson could seize upon its ingredients as symbols for the poetry of terror and ecstasy. Edwin Arlington Robinson had no such luck.

During his most fruitful years, between 1896 and 1916, he suffered a kind of absolute silence and neglect, something explicable only by the murkiness and the chaos of literary standards of the time. There was little for him to draw upon in his cultural environment except a kind of waning and effete idealism, the thin residue of the transcendental theory (which indeed rather hampered than aided his natural poetic instinct); and there was little for him to appeal to in the minds and imagination of readers. It was not only that his lack of readership was the source of pain that led him to the brink of suicide; it was also—his biographer Louis O. Coxe (Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1969) has persuasively argued—that the long years of public indifference actually damaged him as a poet. He was a very fine poet; but it is more than possible that he would have been even better if he had been luckier. Considerable success, along with honors and a modest affluence, came to him in the 1920s. But by this time he had virtually abandoned the dramatic and reflective lyric by which he had made his enduring mark in favor of a series of long narrative poems, some of them very popular and prize-winning but not likely, today, to engage many readers. By that time, too, the modern vision, or, as it is sometimes called, “the modern tradition,” had taken hold of Anglo-American literary culture, and the important voices in American poetry—Eliot, Pound, and later William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane—were carrying the art into areas (imagist, symbolist, metaphysical, and in some ways European) from which Robinson was self-excluded. Seen in broad outline, Robinson's career resembles one of his own ironic and compassionate lyrics based on the theme of failure, including the failure of success. Like Miniver Cheevy, he picked the wrong time to be born into.

If Robinson's life sometimes seems a reflection of his poetry, there is no doubt that his finest poems are in part a reflection of his life, and of his darkly troubled family backgroud. He was born in December 1869, in Head Tide, Maine, the third son of Edward and Mary Palmer Robinson; after going nameless for six months, the child was christened Edwin at the suggestion of a lady from Arlington, Massachusetts, who was then rewarded by having her hometown chosen for the middle name. The following September, the family moved to Gardiner, Maine (the Tilbury Town of Robinson's poetry), a burgeoning mill and factory town of some forty-five hundred inhabitants where, except for two years at Harvard, Robinson would live more or less uninterruptedly till 1897, when he moved down to New York (“the town down the river,” as Robinson would call it in his wry Yankee way). The Robinsons never quite “made it” in Gardiner, socially or otherwise. Mary Robinson could count the distinguished Dudley family among her ancestry, and Robinson could properly claim to be descended from the New World's first genuine poet, the Mistress Anne Bradstreet who married Governor Dudley. But Edward Robinson, though he amassed a certain amount of wealth through his involvement with local factories and banks and through the manipulation of farm mortgages, and became a citizen of some renown, was known derisively as the Duke of Puddledock and was not invited to the grander mansions on the hill. Still, the years of the poet's childhood were passed in reasonable comfort (though he would later recall that at the age of six he had spent some hours in a rocking chair pondering the question of why he had ever been born) and it was not until late in his adolescence that things began to go, at first mildly, then hideously, awry.

Dean Robinson, Edwin's older brother, had gone to college and medical school and had begun the practice of medicine, a profession for which he was woefully unfitted. He wore himself out at tasks from which he derived no sense of reward, took to morphine to keep himself going, abandoned his practice, and came back to the family home to live out the wreckage of his life. Edwin loved him and admired him extravagantly (“Dean knew more at twenty than I shall ever know,” he said later, in sad retrospect); it was his first close experience of desperate failure. The second son, Herman, was to be the financial wizard of the family. He toured the Middle West, speculating in land, mills, railroads, extending his father's resources in a heady effort to multiply them—until the smash came; whereupon he took to drink with bitter and serious determination, became at last a helpless alcholic, leaving his beautiful wife, the former Emma Shepherd (with whom Edwin has been rumored, probably falsely, to have been in love), and their three daughters largely dependent on the very small and very occasional donations from the youngest brother. When Edward Robinson, the father, died in 1892, he was all but bankrupt, an acrimonious old man vainly demanding explanations from a world that had somehow destroyed him. The culminating horror was the death of Mary Robinson four years later. She was strickened by black diphtheria, and no townsman would even enter the house for fear of contagion. The doctor refused to call and the dying woman was cared for by the three sons; the pastor intoned a prayer at a safe distance through an open window; and when told that Mrs. Robinson was dead, the undertaker left a coffin on the front porch and departed in haste. The sons (one of them, Dean, more nearly dead than alive himself) saw to their mother's burial in the family plot of the Gardiner graveyard.

For examples of frustration, defeat, wreckage, and in general of the smitten life, Robinson needed thus to look no further than his own family, though he did in fact look beyond it—for his early poems and for years thereafter—at least as far as other secretively troubled residents of Gardiner. And it was the experience of the devastations wrought upon those dear to him—his brother Dean and, more ambiguously, his mother—that gave him the oddly detached sympathy that is the strength and perhaps also the limitation of his characteristic poems. The note was struck perfectly in “Reuben Bright”:

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 the night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.

The poem is from Robinson's first volume, The Torrent and the Night Before, published in 1896, the year of his mother's death.

His literary education, meanwhile, had been spurred by the two years (1891-1893) he managed to complete at Harvard before financial disaster back home made it impossible for him to continue. The Robinson household was not without books; there was Anne Bradstreet in the background; and Edward Robinson was not opposed to the reading and even the writing of poetry so long as it did not interfere with the serious business of life. But the period at Harvard, though it was not a happy one for Robinson personally, served to introduce him to a larger world and to other young literary enthusiasts—like William Vaughn Moody, of whom Robinson became a friend, admirer, and wary rival (and in celebration of whose highly successful play, The Great Divide, Robinson would write a poem called “The White Lights”). He was not a particularly voracious reader (it might be hazarded that most American writers who went to college read rather less than those who did not), nor were his tastes unusual. He enjoyed the Romantic writers, but he was also drawn to Latin poetry (some of which he translated at an early age), and perhaps something of the gravity and solidity of the Virgilian lyric may be felt amid the Yankee idiom and tonality of Robinson's own verse. He was not affected by Browning, whose “men and women” might otherwise be thought to have been an obvious influence upon him; but he did respond to Kipling and, to a lesser degree, Housman.

Still, as more than one observer of Robinson has suggested, it is less to previous poetry than to fiction—especially nineteenth-century American, English, and French fiction—that one must turn for anything like “sources” for his poetry. If there was no powerful ongoing movement in poetry for Robinson to attach himself to in the nineties, there was a strong movement in fiction, both at home and abroad: that is, the development of literary realism. The evidence is inadequate, but one naturally associates Robinson's poems of New York City life more with the novels of William Dean Howells than with the exoticism of his best-known contemporaries in poetry; and “Eros Turannos,” one of Robinson's masterpieces, gazes at the nearly hidden desperation of a wealthy married woman in a manner remarkably similar to a short story by Edith Wharton. There is little doubt that Robinson was a serious reader of Henry James during most of his life and that he also seized upon Hawthorne's tales of dark New England passion and human fatality. Even his attachment to Emerson seems to have been mainly to Emerson's effort to restore the pungent everyday language of street and farm to poetry, and what appealed to him in Whitman was the poet's experiments with narrative realism.

All this constitutes a fact of considerable importance. Robinson is not to be reduced to a single lyrical mode; and yet many of his best poems—one picks, almost at random, “Reuben Bright,” “The Clerks,” “Eros Turannos,” “Old Trails,” “The Poor Relation,” “Mr. Flood's Party”—deal with themes, episodes, individual characters that before Robinson and for the most part after him were dealt with by writers of fiction. What is perhaps more surprising, Robinson scarcely bothered to devise new poetic forms in order to project his little dramas: he preferred to reinvigorate the forms that were available. “Reuben Bright,” like “The Clerks,” is cast in the form of an absolutely conventional Petrarchan sonnet. The form of the poem constrains and tightens the narrative content, while the narrative movement to some extent loosens and vitalizes the form.

All but one of the poems in The Torrent and the Night Before were reprinted in The Children of the Night (1897). At least half a dozen of these are very good indeed, and neither volume went entirely unnoticed; but they did not elicit from the literary periodicals any demand for new work. Robinson had a job of sorts at Harvard in 1898-1899 and then moved to New York City, where he would spend part of every year for the rest of his life. He wandered the streets, frequenting bars and, from time to time, brothels, and consorted with the bohemian set. By 1902 he had a new volume ready: Captain Craig. On this book he rested his poetic case, so to speak; he presented it to the public as his announcement of himself as a mature poet—particularly in the long title poem, which memorializes a picaresque figure whom Robinson had come to know in New York (and whose actual name was Alfred Louis), and also in “Isaac and Archibald,” which is in fact superior to “Captain Craig” and is one of the handsomest and freshest treatments in American poetry of the theme of initiation. When the volume was received with almost total silence, Robinson was reduced to something like despair.

For a time he threatened to follow the alcoholic path to ruin of his unhappy brother Herman and wrote next to nothing. Then, in March 1905, he received a letter from the White House: “I have enjoyed your poems … so much,” wrote President Roosevelt, “that I must write to tell you so.” Roosevelt's son Kermit had drawn his father's attention to The Children of the Night; and the president followed up his letter not only by having Robinson appointed to the customs house on Wall Street at the then princely salary of two thousand dollars a year, but also by writing an article for the Outlook in which he praised Robinson's poetry as giving off “just a little of the light that never was on land or sea.” “I am not sure I understand ‘Luke Havergal,’” Roosevelt remarked, naming one of the strangest and best of Robinson's early poems, “but I am entirely sure I like it.”

Roosevelt salvaged Robinson's external situation, and Robinson was now able to come in turn to the aid of his sister-in-law and her three daughters. But the president's public support rather hindered than helped Robinson's standing with the literati of New York, nor did it stimulate Robinson to new creative efforts. He spent his days reading in the customs house office before going back to his room to drink heavily and talk till all hours with his few cronies. When Roosevelt left the White House in 1909, Robinson was out of a job—and, miraculously, experienced a sudden recovery of power. In 1910, he brought out The Town Down the River.

Though there was little immediate acclaim, Robinson's reputation was at last beginning to grow. In 1911 he was invited to the MacDowell Colony in Peterboro, New Hampshire, a haven for serious, indigent writers; it was here that Robinson thereafter did most of his work. Harriet Monroe's Poetry was inaugurated in 1912, and Robinson began to appear in it; other magazines were after him; in Boston the English poet Alfred Noyes proclaimed that Robinson was the best American poet living. When The Man Against the Sky was published in 1916, a number of reviewers, and not the least discerning and influential among them, found themselves in agreement with Noyes's estimate.

The Man Against the Sky does contain a group of poems sufficient by themselves to make any poet's lasting reputation—including, “Flammonde,” “The Gift of God,” “Hillcrest,” “Eros Turannos,” “Old Trails,” “Veteran Sirens,” and “The Poor Relation.” Yet there was something ominous in the intellectually ambitious meditative poem that gave the volume its title, something ominous too in the fact that this was the work singled out by most commentators for special admiration. The intention of “The Man Against the Sky” is indeed admirable; in one perspective, it is noble: nothing less than to confront, through the resources of poetry, the very mystery of the universe—the mystery, that is, of human knowledge, of man's capacity to perceive his relationship with reality. But here again luck was against Robinson. There was simply not enough in his intellectual background and environment to provide him—as Melville and Emily Dickinson in their time had been provided—with the instruments necessary for such an inquiry. The terms from which a poet might draw meaningful symbols and images, the ingredients of his poetic discourse, were lacking. The result is a sort of dignified bombast, an earnest but unsuccessful attempt to resurrect an Emersonianism in which Robinson no longer really believed.

But that may be putting the case too simply, and even (though such is far from being the intention) condescendingly. The fact is that Robinson's relation to Emerson was highly ambiguous. If he was tempted at times to strive after the spiritual freedom Emerson proclaimed, he was also tempted at other times to accept too quickly Emerson's occasional acknowledgment of the element of necessity, or fate, in human experience. Harold Bloom, in The Ringers in the Tower (1971), makes the latter point and notes that Robinson read Emerson's essays “Fate” and “Power” as early as 1899, was much struck by them, and said that Emerson walloped the reader “with a big New England shingle,” the weapon of fatalism. But however one interprets the matter, one is forced to the conclusion that neither his personal circumstances nor his intellectual environment provided Robinson with the resources to project a persuasive idealism on the one hand, or on the other a vision of what Hawthorne called the “dark necessity.”

Robinson's best poems, nonetheless, are glimpses into the darkness. Some of these are among the lyrics in The Three Taverns (1920), Avon's Harvest (1921), and his Collected Poems (also 1921), which won him the first of three Pulitzer prizes. But the cosmic appetite apparent in “The Man Against the Sky” could be sensed even more strongly in Merlin (1917), in the two Arthurian stories in verse which followed over a decade, Lancelot and Tristram, and in the succession of narrative poems beginning with The Man Who Died Twice. The Arthurian poems represented Robinson's attempt, stimulated by the First World War, to wrestle with vast problems of history and politics, but to do so through character, dialogue, patterns of relationship. Conrad Aiken was brilliantly right when he observed, in 1922, that Merlin and Lancelot “give us a Malory as Henry James might have written and enlarged it,” and that in both instances the narrative method is strikingly Jamesian: “Merlin and Vivien have here all the dim subtleties and delicate mutual awarenesses of the people, let us say, in The Wings of the Dove. The story, the poetry, is precisely in these hoverings and perturbations, these pauses and approaches and flights.”

Nothing finer could be said about the Arthurian poems; but at a greater distance in time, Merlin and the others strike us as Jamesian only in technique, with not enough of the old master's tough moral substance. As to the other narrative poems, they all now blur together in one's memory, to paraphrase Louis O. Coxe, in one long gray undifferentiated work. There are arresting passages in all of them, especially when, as in The Man Who Died Twice (which won the poet his second Pulitzer prize), Robinson seems to be reflecting on the theme of failure as it relates to his own artistic career. And there is some hint that in King Jasper, which was published posthumously in 1936 with a curiously grudging introduction by Robert Frost, the then dying poet was attempting a new narrative idiom.

But Robinson's achievement, and it is very considerable, consists finally not in those large poetic enterprises by which, in his later years, he exercised the role of the Great Poet in a recognizably Georgian manner. It consists in a goodly handful of lyric poems, dramatic or meditative or both, as the case may be. When we think of Robinson, we think of Reuben Bright shaken with grief and fright, of Luke Havergal mysteriously summoned to the western gate, of the clerks grown old without fulfilling the vague bright promise of youth, of Miniver Cheevy dreaming and scratching his head, of Richard Cory going home one fine summer night to put a bullet in his head, of the “poor relation” ensconced by her unfeeling family in an apartment perhaps in Yonkers, of old Eben Flood swallowing his drink and singing his quavery song on the hillside at night. We hear a voice, calm and sure, speaking out of and into the darkness, telling us of loneliness, sorrow, defeat, endurance. It may be that Robinson insisted too much on the “light” for which he always waited—that he concealed a little the tragic vision that he really possessed. But the expression of such a vision during Robinson's best years might also have meant a silence on the part of readers even longer drawn out than the one he suffered from. Robinson was a superior poet, but an unlucky one.

An anecdote the critic R. P. Blackmur used to tell about Robinson has a fine symbolic quality. Young Blackmur, himself a native of Maine, had been taken to be introduced to Robinson, in Gardiner. Robinson was sitting on the front porch of his house, and as the shadows lengthened Blackmur could no longer clearly make him out. Finally Robinson asked, in a low voice, “What do you want to do?” “I want to be a poet,” Blackmur answered. After a silence: “Don't!” said the voice out of the darkness.

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