The Young Robinson as Critic and Self-Critic
[In the following essay, Anderson discusses Robinson's theory of poetry as revealed in his comments on his own works and those of his associates.]
“I don't know anything about the poetry of the future,” E. A. Robinson once said, “except that it must have, in order to be poetry, the same eternal and unchangeable quality of magic that it has always had. Of course, it must always be colored by the age and the individual, but the thing itself will always remain unmistakable and indefinable.”1
In a like vein but somewhat earlier, Robinson had written to a friend, “… he [Goldwin Smith] thinks Tennyson is great because he can call ‘hydraulics, astronomy, steam railways, balloons, etc.’ by poetical names. … Nothing in the world tickles me quite so much as this prophetic analysis of the poetry of the future. When it gets to be great it will be very much like certain very smooth and inevitable places in Sophocles and Shakespeare. It will be great for what it is, not in spite of what it is.”2
Strikingly similar as these two statements are, they were made in totally different contexts. The first was made in 1913 in an interview with William S. Braithwaite at a time when Robinson's poetry was about to receive increasing acceptance and even acclaim. The second statement was made fourteen years earlier, after the publication of The Children of the Night, in 1897, and just as Robinson was getting into the writing of “Captain Craig.”
Underlying both statements is a critical position that Robinson held throughout his life: great poetry is individual, contemporary, and timeless. The poetry of the future, like that of the past and the ever-moving present, would be part of a dynamic tradition, constantly extended and modified by individual poets striving to present in artistic form something significant about the human condition. What additional characteristics great poetry would have other than its quality of magic, Robinson did not say. But it would be unmistakable—in the long run. This is the kind of poetry Robinson tried to write, and it was the long run he counted on. In his own mind, moreover, he had specific ideas of what he was looking for.
Robinson's public utterances were few and rather general, and he left behind no critical treatises. He did, however, have a sharp critical faculty which was respected by his contemporaries. In fact, he played the role of critic—sometimes asked, sometimes not—for a number of his fellow poets over a period of years. Josephine Preston Peabody, Hermann Hagedorn, Lilla Cabot Perry, and others sent their work to him for criticism. Robinson was at his best with a manuscript before him. Then he could point specifically to what was unmistakable and what was not. Several of these manuscripts are still extant. On the cover sheet of one, in Miss Peabody's bold script, is written “Violin Withheld by J. P. P. Corrected by E. A. Robinson!” Inside, in Robinson's microscopic “immoral fist,” to use Moody's term, the manuscript is covered with Robinson's marginal and interlinear notes. Sometimes he questions (“Is will the word you want?”); sometimes he admonishes (“Be careful.”); at other times he states flatly (“Wrong verb.”). Robinson followed the progress of his friends' poems from manuscript to print. And his letters, both before and after publication of the poems, are filled with critical comments that reflect clearly the qualities he looked for in poetry—his own and others. Together these comments constitute his Ars Poetica.
Although some of Robinson's letters have been published, notably those to Harry de Forest Smith and, more recently, to Edith Brower, the bulk of his more than four-thousand letters are still in manuscript form in libraries and in private hands across the country. Recently gathered together, they are now being prepared for publication. When they are published, Robinson's role as critic will be fully revealed. Meanwhile the letters to Josephine Preston Peabody have been transcribed. In them we get a glimpse of young Robinson the critic in action. These letters, especially those from 1899 to 1902, are extremely significant, particularly when we take into account the poetic scene in general and Robinson's position at the time.
That the age was a barren one for poetry goes without saying. Standard accounts to the contrary, however, there was dissatisfaction with contemporary verse, and there was a desire for a new poet. The call for a new poet, heard in the latter years of the 1890s, became increasingly insistent with the approach of the twentieth century. The loss of the older established poets, national pride, rivalry with England, the Spanish-American War, and the turn of the century itself—all contributed to the mood of the times and the search for a new poet and a new poetry. The question was one of direction.
E. A. Robinson, as much as anyone, was aware that contemporary poetry was arid and irrelevant, and that a new approach was necessary to bring it into consonance with the modern spirit. As early as The Torrent and the Night Before, Robinson had been consciously moving in new directions. “When it comes to ‘nightingales and roses,’” he wrote his friend Gledhill, “I am not ‘in it’ nor have I the smallest desire to be. I sing, in my own particular manner, of heaven & hell and now and then of natural things (supposing they exist) of a more prosy connotation than those generally admitted into the domain of metre. In short I write whatever I think is appropriate to the subject and let tradition go to the deuce.”3 With the addition of such poems as “Richard Cory,” “Cliff Klingenhagen,” and “Reuben Bright,” The Children of the Night extended the line laid down by “Aaron Stark,” “The Clerks,” and one or two others written just prior to the publication of The Torrent and the Night Before. Although The Children of the Night was a marked improvement over the first volume, Robinson recognized it as only a partial formulation of what he was working toward.
The Children of the Night was published in December 1897. On January 15, 1898, Robinson wrote to Edith Brower, “I have been trying to get started on a piece of blank verse which, if it is ever done will be a book by itself—not a very big one, but still a book. If it goes on as it has been going it will be out some time in the middle of the next century; but I hope and rather feel that I am slowly getting it under control and that I shall be able to do it somehow. I doubt if many people will care to read it but that doesn't seem to make any difference; I've got to do it. And let me add—to relieve you of a possible uneasiness—that it is not ‘preachy.’”4 To Harry de Forest Smith, he wrote in February, “I'm doing some work but it is all in the way of an entirely new departure and I cannot bring myself to feel anything like sure of it. … Just now I am in a transition stage and realize that I ought not to print anything for five or six years, but it rather looks as if I should get out another book in about a year from now. It is in my system and must be expelled somehow.”5 By March 1898, on a different tack, he had thrown aside his “blank verse effusion” and was writing—in his head—“another of an entirely different sort.” “This new book,” he wrote to Edith Brower, “is going to be a wicked dose for Dr. Coan, and possibly the same thing for you; but I hope you may be able to stand certain parts of it.”6 It was in this experimental vein that Robinson worked from 1898 to 1901, composing the poems that eventually were published in Captain Craig, A Book of Poems, 1902.
It is a mistake to think, as some have done, that Robinson was discouraged about his work at this time. Quite the contrary. He was disturbed about things at home, and he was frustrated for a time because his financial situation forced him to take a job at Harvard. But his attitude toward his work was enthusiastic. In the main he was pleased with the reception of The Children of the Night, and despite the interruption of the job at Cambridge, this period must be considered one of Robinson's most creative. It was during this time that he composed “The Book of Annandale,” “The Growth of ‘Lorraine,’” “The Woman and the Wife,” “Captain Craig,” “Isaac and Archibald,” “Aunt Imogen,” “Twilight Song,” “The Sage,” “Erasmus,” “The Wife of Palissy,” and the half-dozen others that went into the completed volume. At first Robinson thought of them as three books, then as two, and finally, when it became apparent that “Captain Craig” was not acceptable by itself, as one volume. The heart of the volume, so far as Robinson was concerned, was “Captain Craig.” Begun in the winter of 1899, it was completed by April 1900 but not published until October 1902. “A sort of human development of the octaves,”7 the poem became an objective presentation of what Robinson had expressed subjectively in the “Octaves” in The Children of the Night. It was also “a rather particular kind of twentieth century comedy.”8 There is no doubt that “Captain Craig” was Robinson's major effort to meet what he considered to be the poetic demands of the new age. And it is in this light that his letters to Josephine Preston Peabody take on special significance, for they reveal the young Robinson as critic and as self-critic at a crucial time in his development.9
Though not much read today, Josephine Preston Peabody was a well-known and respected poet and dramatist during the first two decades of the century. Best known for The Piper, which won the Stratford Play Competition in 1910, she was the author of six plays and six volumes of poetry. In 1894 she attracted the attention of Horace E. Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly (who about the same time had rejected Robinson's prose sketches), and in that year published ten poems in the Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's, The Chap-Book, and The Independent. From that time on she published regularly in the magazines, collecting her poems in slim volumes from time to time. Her lively enthusiasm and sensitive nature made her appealing as a person, and these qualities are reflected in a number of short lyrics of delicacy and feeling. She loved Joy and Beauty and Life, and she wanted to be a Poet and Dramatist. Robinson's correspondence with her began in February 1899, shortly after the publication of her first volume of poems: “… I am very glad for a chance to make a personal acknowledgment of the pleasure I ‘derived’ from The Wayfarers,” Robinson wrote. “They overtook me in Winthrop, Maine, at a time when I was trying to invite my soul by playing scales on a saxophone. They—The Wayfarers, not the scales,—helped me out amazingly” (February 8, 1899).10 The fact that Miss Peabody was a mutual friend of Daniel Gregory Mason and William Vaughn Moody gave an added dimension to the correspondence.
Although Robinson published no critical essays as such, he did review in print at least one volume of poetry: Miss Peabody's The Wayfarers. The review is unsigned, and the circumstances leading to its publication are not fully known, but internal evidence in the article and in Robinson's letters confirms his authorship. Hitherto unnoted and not easily accessible, Robinson's review is printed here in its entirety.11 It provides an excellent backdrop for the critical comments in the letters.
A Book of Verse That Is Poetry
Every critical reader of poetry, or of anything else, must involuntarily establish for himself a more or less definite standard whereby to discriminate between mediocrity and the real thing; and when this reader finds a modern poem that has in it more of the real thing than mediocrity, he feels that he has discovered something worth while. And he who discovers or in [any] way gets possession of The Wayfarers, by Miss Josephine Preston Peabody, cannot but feel that the real thing has been accomplished.
This does not necessarily imply that Miss Peabody has written a great book, or even a great poem; but it does imply that she has done something quite out of the ordinary. This may not, from the severer point of view, be startlingly high praise; but from the point of view of contemporary verse-making, it is practically equivalent to saying there is no writer in America to-day who is qualified to inspire Miss Peabody with any great amount of poetical awe. Her book may not commend itself to that exclusive majority which reads poetry “only for the thought;” but it is not, on the other hand, in any way to be identified with the rather distressing product of a school whose watchword is a self-confessed fallacy known as “art for art's sake”—whatever that may be. Art is a means to an end, and Miss Peabody is fortunate enough to know it. Consequently her work is neither form without substance, nor substance without form, but an artistic combination of the two—a combination which must occur whenever there is to be real literature.
These two things, however, are not in themselves enough to make poetry. There must be imagination and sympathy, there must be spirituality and wisdom. Miss Peabody's imagination is not of the pounding, pyrotechnic sort that has made so many ephemeral reputations for its victims; nor is her spirituality of that irrational, unsubstantial kind that causes so many lovely first editions to disappear from the mental gaze of mortals like colorless toy-balloons,—but she has imagination, and she has spirituality, and she has the other things.
The first and longest poem, from which the book takes its attractive title, contains much to praise and very little to condemn—nothing in fact beyond a few feminine vagaries of rhetoric which the author will outgrow. The following stanzas, which are no better than many others that might be chosen, will speak for themselves:—
XVIII
She sat where all the high
roads meet
And all the striving ways
are one.
The dumb sea crept unto her
feet
With lowered mane, his wrath
undone.
The voice of all the worlds
astir
Sunk to the past at sight
of her.
There was nought left but her blind eyes that
gazed into the climbing sun.
XX
She spake: “I am that
One ye sought
Through years that fade,
through ways that wind.
I am that One for whom ye
wrought
The lovely names ye thought
to find:
‘Life, the Revealer,
when we reach
Her mother knees, shall smile
to teach
Her soul to us.’ And would I not, if I
but knew! But I am blind.
XXI
Yet by the stranger gifts
ye bring,
And by your alien prayers
that throng,
I know I am not that ye sing,
The little dream that does
me wrong.
You pray me that I show you
what
My one name is: I know it
not;
Only I know I am not Death, I am not Love, I
am not Song.
XXIII
“They dream I sit on
high, afar,
A light to pierce all mystery;
Untroubled as a fixed star
That heeds no sorrow of the
sea.
Yet stars make patient pilgrimage
Across the dark, from age
to age;
And who would know me that I am, must take my
hand and go with me.”
There are thirty of these stanzas in the whole poem, and all of them are good. The closing one is particularly good, with just enough of reminiscent flourish in it to give the desired culminating effect without an overshow of consciousness:—
XXX
I know not if the years be
years,
As, great and small, we journey
on,
Nor if the service of the
spheres
And of the friendly needs [=weeds] be one …
Like singing harvesters,
that fare
Weary and glad, we go where'er
She leads the way, with strong, blind eyes,
that dare to gaze into the sun.
As there is much to praise in this opening poem, so is there much to praise in the seventy pages that follow it—though there may be a little more to condemn in the way of occasional extravagance and repetition. It is devoutly to be wished that the writer will in her next volume abjure such words as “glamourie” and “enringing” for instance. “Glamourie” may be a matter of taste, but “enringing,” when used twice as a rhyming word in a small volume, is rhetorical crime. “Fade along the hush of air, Burden on the weed,” may be all right, but certain disreputable and irreverent readers who are given to smoke pipes in silent places will almost inevitably misinterpret it. These, like many others that might be pointed out, are little faults, but they are the very faults which are likely to be magnified by the casual reader. Books of verse are not exactly novelties nowadays, and it behooves the writer of one to be wary in the printing of anything that may possibly give a totally wrong impression of the book as a whole.
But there is nothing to be misinterpreted or questioned in a poem like the following, in which there is a union of art and substance, of wisdom and imagination, that amounts almost, if not quite, to genius:—
Ah, ye that loved my laughter once,
Open to me! 'Tis I
That shed you songs like summer leaves
Whene'er a wind came
by.
The leaves are spent and the year is old,
And the fields are gray that once were gold
Heart of the brook, my heart is cold—
My song is like to die.
The windows look another way,
The walls are deaf and stark.
Who heeds a glow-worm in the day,
Or lifts a frozen lark?
Warm yourself with the days that were;
Follow the Summer, beg of her,
But never sadden us, Jongleur,
Jongleur, go down the dark!
Jongleur
Poems like “The Fishers,” “The Weavers,” “Canonized,” “Daphne Laurea,” and the “Envoy” might be quoted as more powerful, more significant, but this little song is enough to illustrate the author's method of uniting something to say with an artist's ability to say it. The “Envoy” is unnecessarily modest, but “the wisdom of the one day more” will require a good deal of patience and hard work for its adequate poetical expression. If Miss Peabody is willing to do this work, and refuses to be flattered into doing too much of the kind of thing that usually follows the publication of a successful first book, her next appearance will be a literary event—without quotation marks.
Having established himself as critic at the outset of their relationship, Robinson continued the role of preacher-critic as his friendship with Miss Peabody developed. Sometimes playfully but also seriously, he pounded his critical pulpit. And Miss Peabody accepted the relationship in the same spirit, though not without demurrers and rejoinders when their critical judgments clashed. Prior to publication, she submitted to Robinson the manuscripts of her next two volumes of poems, Fortune and Men's Eyes (published October 1900) and The Singing Leaves (published in 1903 but written for the most part in 1901). The manuscript of Marlowe, a five-act poetic drama, she read to Robinson in New York in April 1901.
Robinson's concern with “the real thing,” the artistic combination of substance and form, expressed in his review of The Wayfarers, is revealed more fully in his letters to Miss Peabody. Many of his comments deal with questions of diction, with the language of poetry, broadly defined:
“Stay-at-Home” [April 17, 1900]
Your “laughters have” in the song, does not satisfy me. It is strained and, I think, altogether out of harmony with the rest. “Laughter has” would be commonplace, but I am not at all sure that it is not what you want. … Whatever you do with the Stay-at-Home song, don't let it go into print until you can read it through without the ghost of a misgiving. The thing is too good to be sent out with “patches.”
“Fortune and Men's Eyes” [April 17, 1900]
May I suggest that you be careful in your use of “o' ”. It is always bad; and in “the greatest o' his day” it is needlessly awkward.
“Finches that sing small” is more musical and natural [than “sings small”.]
“Pat as beer” jars somehow;—not because it is alcoholic but because the consonants are too thick. [JPP later changed it to “Pat as ale.”]
“You look palely” would stagger a modern purist. Certainly you will take it out.
“Of baiting of a bear” is clumsy.
“Sweetened corse” is awful. Take it out.
Voice mixes unpleasantly with visions.
Rewrite line “I would I had not undertaken etc.” It has not the ghost of rhythm.
“Belike” will make the judicious grieve.
Aghast. You have a tendency to make your directions to[o] “literary.” Don't overdo it.
“Spell bound by a terrible recognition” has a [“]boarding-school sound.” “Vaguely blue,” likewise.
“The Violin Withheld” [April 17, 1900?]
Perfect is an overworked word. Don't use it if you can find anything else. It is not what you want here anyhow. [The first line of the poem in manuscript read “The perfect song unfolded, curve on curve.” JPP changed it to read: “The Song, at last, unfolded, curve on curve.”]
You must not say this too many times. [“Nigh to the central Heart, I understood; / And saw that it was good.” Fifteen lines before JPP had written “Nigh to the heart of Light, I heard it send / Light pulsing without end.” She dropped the offending two lines.]
This “and” lulls the music. [“With stranger ways, and threadbare and alone, / And shod so painfully.” JPP let it stand. Apparently she missed EAR's point, which presumably was to omit the and, for she contemplated using all as a possible substitute.]
Make this a little thinner. [JPP had written “Of rose, that hast such lore from brownest earth.” EAR wrote his comment below the line and underlined hast and brownest. In the revision JPP kept the hast but changed the line to read: “Of rose, that hast the lore from that brown earth.”]
You can improve this. [“My Violin, if thou wert truly mine.” JPP revised it to “My Violin, if I could call thee mine.”]
Be careful how you repeat unusual words. If you will pardon me, this is a fault of yours. [“Of heart's desire, the utmost urge of want.” No doubt Robinson had in mind JPP's repeated use of “enringing” and “glamourie” in The Wayfarers. In a letter dated August 9, 1900, he referred to the matter again: “… I haven't yet got over those Enringings in ‘The Wayfarers’. The crass language I used on them in Badger's ‘review’ ought …” The remainder of the letter is missing.]
“Stay-at-Home” [May 9, 1900]
“Now the laughing's all gone by” is good enough to put an end to your misgiving, but is not, to my mind so good as “Now the laughing has gone by”—for it seems to me that the second arrangement adds somehow to the remoteness of all things pleasant. I doubt if I should ever have thought of your word, which is undoubtedly better than “laughter.” [Here, too, JPP accepted EAR's recommendation:
Now the laughing has gone by,
On the highway from the inn;
And the dust has settled down,
And the house is dead within.]
“The Source” [May 9, 1900]
… you have improved the last line in The Source and …“reckoned for” is not of sufficient importance to cause you any great amount of hesitation; … You must be very ill indeed if you think seriously of taking “glow worms” from The Source and putting “motes ordainèd” in its place: you make me ask if you know Orpheus C. Kerr's “Preservèd Fish”.12 [The last stanza of “The Source” reads as follows:
Then by the Source that still doth pour
On star and glow-worm reckoned for,
I will have more and ever more!]
“I Shall Arise” [June 11, 1900]
The expression “something had to die” gives me a feeling of unholy joy which I am sure you did not anticipate, and I feel confident that it will give the same thing to others. No, it is not slang at all; but there may be in it a subtle suggestion of “something had to come”, and it makes me think of a dentist. [In this case JPP let the line stand:
“And in such conflict, something
had to die …
It was not I.”]
“The Wingless Joy” [June 11, 1900]
“Judas!” This is startling, but I think it is rather hazardous. I think transplanted cusswords of the second intensity are always rather hazardous. I think also that your second reference to J. would be strengthened by leaving this out.
I think you lost by repeating “unwisdom.” It makes one think you are too conscious that it came so remarkably well the first time. It is not one of the words that will stand this sort of repetition.
“Return” [July 1900?]
… your Soldier Boy [=“Return”] is very musical and pleasing. The only fault I have to find with it is that it may not be quite natural enough in its language. … Your singing facility seems to be hampered just a little by a certain antipathy of style, … I'll say nothing of a slight tendency on your part to conventionalize the old horse Pegasus, for that would be unkind.
“Grace” [July 1900?]
The Grace is highly satisfactory because it is so thoroughly natural. I should say “God give us heart to sing”; that is better than the other line for the simple reason that it says more and is just as musical. [JPP took EAR's choice.]
“The Fool” [January 31, 1901]
… I will go on now and tell you why I think your “fool” song must be fixed. As it stands, I think the third stanza completely spoils it.
[Laugh, stare, deny. Because I shall
be true,—
The only triumph slain by
no surprise:
True, true, to that forlornest truth in you.
The wan, beleaguered thing
behind your eyes,
Starving on lies.]
I hate to move to comparisons, but I must tell you that the five lines beginning with “Laugh, stare, deny” make me think of nothing on earth except Browning with cramps. The very complexity of the combination and of the punctuation is enough to show that you yourself are not satisfied with it, …
“Prince Charlie” [January 31, 1901]
The other two are wonderfully good, though I don't like your experimental assonance of bear and despair in II, or “sharpens” in the “Epitaph” [=“Prince Charlie”].
[O had you died upon the field
That was so grim to plough,
The tears had blinded every eye
That sharpens on you now.]
If you stop your reader in these little things, which must be simple or nothing, you will make unnecessary trouble for yourself. … So you see I have treated you pretty well this time; and I hope you will give me a chance to do it again before long. It is a mystery to me how you write these things and get so much of the essence of poetry into them. But I won't worry about the mystery if you will only keep on writing them.
“Prince Charlie” [February 17, 1901]
When you tell me that you are going to keep “sharpens” because it expresses just what you mean, you compel me to pound my critical pulpit again and to call your attention to what I believe to be an Important Fact in poetry: viz. that the word which seems to express the required meaning most clearly and concretely is very often the last word that metrical language—particularly song language—will tolerate.
Such a pronouncement on the language of poetry makes a good place for a partial summary: avoid archaic language, the trite, the strained, and overstatement. Instead strive for naturalness, musicality, and economy of expression. The interest expressed here in the accommodation of sound to sense—the avoidance of jolts and jars—comes under the heading of tone and style. With all these matters Robinson was concerned in his own poetry as he strove to develop a style that was at once individual and universal. Other matters concerned him also: vagueness, form and structure, content. Back of them all was the question of how to write a poem that was both modern and a work of art.
In April 1900 Miss Peabody made the following entry in her diary: “E. A. Robinson exhorting me to drop ‘philosophizing’ and twittering at infinities and to write about things objective. Want to, but how can I without being D———d pessimistic?”13 In Robinson's long letter of April 17, 1900, there is nothing to this effect. In the Josephine Preston Peabody Marks Collection in the Houghton Library at Harvard, the dated letter immediately preceding is November 27, 1899. Apparently some letters are missing. In all likelihood Robinson returned the manuscript of “The Violin Withheld” with the letter of April 17. On the cover sheet Miss Peabody had written: “This Ode has given me trouble; I'm so apt to fall into pigeon English when my ‘mystical mind’ gets talking! Can you suggest a better title?” Robinson's blunt reply on the manuscript itself may be the source of the diary entry. If not, it is certainly in the same vein: “The very title of the poem shows that you are playing with false ideas. Try to put away this decadent note entirely and let all the restless idealism go to the deuce for the next five or six years. Then you will treat it with a better sense of proportion.”14
Robinson's comment on “restless idealism” is especially interesting in the light of his own espousal of idealism as “the only logical and satisfactory theory of life.” It was his own restless idealism that he tried to express in a number of poems in his first two volumes, notably in “Two Sonnets” in The Torrent and The Night Before and in his “Octaves” in The Children of the Night. It might seem at first that he was denying his basic philosophy, but the context clearly indicates that it was the treatment that bothered him. This was a sensitive matter for Robinson himself. Harry de Forest Smith had criticized some of his early poems as “damned didactic” and Edith Brower apparently felt that at times Robinson was “preachy.” In his own mind Robinson was sure that idealism (“spirituality and wisdom”) and poetry were not incompatible; it was not philosophy but “philosophizing” in poetry that was bad. Robinson was trying to resolve the issue by using a more objective approach, and he was advocating that Miss Peabody do likewise.
The “decadent note” that Robinson found in “The Violin Withheld” Robinson himself did not completely escape. After the completion of “Captain Craig” he turned once more to poems he had roughed out earlier and to some new ones. In the main these were objective in nature, being dramatic and narrative pieces for the most part. In June 1900, however, perhaps stimulated by the knowledge that his “piece of deliberate degeneration,” “Luke Havergal,” had been selected to appear in Stedman's An American Anthology, he wrote to Miss Brower that he was working on a “symbolical” Twilight Song. He fretted over it during the summer, and in September he was still having difficulty. “I can't even straighten out a place in my Twilight Song,—which, by the way, has been called ‘mistical,’” he wrote Miss Peabody. “It will be hopelessly obscure to the lynx-eyed, but as it was not written for them, I don't mind that very much. On the whole, however, I have come to learn that vagueness is literary damnation (nothing less); and I have determined that whatever I do in the future—excepting now and then an excursion into symbolism, which I cannot wholly throw off—will be tolerably intelligible” (September 14, 1900).
In matters of form and structure Robinson relied in part on a strong visual sense. He liked to see the shape of a poem, and frequently noted that he would be able to make a better judgment when he saw it typed or in print. His preference for a tight form with a clearly-articulated structure is also evident. His first reaction to “The Violin Withheld” was that it was “a total failure.” Part of his dislike was related to its “decadent note” and “false ideas,” but part of it was based on formal grounds. “This introduction is too abrupt—too much compressed—for what follows,” he wrote on the manuscript. “If you could reduce the whole thing to half a dozen stanzas—or say a dozen—with the fourth line short three feet (‘How far I go’ for example) you would get a better result. … Do not think from this that I fail to appreciate the free melody of the ‘irregular ode,’ for I do; but in this case I don't like it. The form has, understandably, a tendency to lead one into the ways of rhythmical laziness, but I don't [think] that you are going to be lazy.”
After the publication of Fortune and Men's Eyes Robinson went over the volume again, devoting parts of two letters to it. About “The Violin Withheld” he remarked: “I don't care so much for the poem as a whole, but as I read it now in type I find that I was wrong in calling it a failure” (November 29, 1900). He preferred “The Comfort” to “The Quiet” because it “has more body … and is better in that it is not so diluted. It seems to me that you are given to attach too much importance to mere length and I will make one more paternal suggestion that you beware of diffuseness. The play [Fortune and Men's Eyes] reads much better in print and the outlines come up with more clearness” (December 10, 1900). He congratulated her for having written “a real book,” but concluded also: “The gist of my valuable reflections on the book is this: that your next work should be the writing of some lyrics—thirty or forty, more or less, mostly in quatrain stanzas and that you work a little harder (one cannot throw things from Cambridge to Yonkers) to keep out any possible vagueness of expression. I am hesitating whether or not to throw away my T. S. [“Twilight Song”] affair on this very ground, but all that does not keep me from preaching” (November 29, 1900).
Robinson's criticism of the irregular ode was based on something more than possible rhythmical laziness. He felt, at this time at least, that it was incompatible with the needs and direction of modern poetry. He had a similar aversion to the masque as a modern form. His summary statement to Josephine Preston Peabody, after reading the manuscript of Fortune and Men's Eyes, was a plea to write about things closer to home: “I hope … you may, in the course of a few years, find something of importance in the nineteenth century. There are all sorts of interesting things, though you may not think so” (April 17, 1900). Later in the year, waiting for the publication of William Vaughn Moody's The Masque of Judgment and Miss Peabody's Fortune and Men's Eyes, he wrote again to Miss Peabody, repeating his point in a different form: “If you people continue to be active you will help me through lots of dull seasons; so I pray you to keep at it, even though it be Marlowes and Masques. When Moody shakes himself free from traditions he will do big things; and it may be that he has done them already. And you are privileged to do the same thing on condition that you recover from your attack of Elizabethanism” (October 23, 1900).
Ironically the poetry of Moody and of Miss Peabody was being published; Robinson's was not. Moody's “Ode in Time of Hesitation,” quickly followed by “Gloucester Moors,” “The Brute,” and “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines,” attracted national attention. The Masque of Judgment, in the fall of 1900, and Poems, in January 1901, brought him to the forefront of critical attention. To some it appeared that he might be the new poet they were looking for. Like Moody Miss Peabody sent her poems out—to Scribner's, the Atlantic Monthly, Poet-Lore—and they too were promptly printed. The Wayfarers was followed by Fortune and Men's Eyes, October 1900, and by Marlowe in 1901. This slip of a girl, whose work Robinson had been criticizing, was even being mentioned as a possible fulfillment of the search for a new poet. “It is an understood thing that the lovers of poetry are constantly on the lookout for the coming great American poet,” a reviewer wrote, “and if there is the slightest indication of power in any fresh aspirant for poetical fame, hope springs up that here at last is the poetical Messiah. It is too soon yet to greet Miss Peabody as the long-expected one, but such a poem as ‘The Wingless Joy’ reveals a strength and originality which readers of poetry should welcome with joyful acclaim.”15 Robinson, certainly another “fresh aspirant,” also sent out his poems to the prestige journals and to others. In the four-year period between The Children of the Night and Captain Craig, the only new Robinson poems published were “The Corridor” and “Erasmus,” both in the Harvard Monthly. The story of the journey of “Captain Craig” through five publishing houses, and one other house, is too well known to need repeating. Although Robinson had anticipated the possibility that the poem, his “Big Thing,” might not receive immediate acceptance, either by the established old-time publishers or by the majority of readers, he did hope it might make its way with the more discriminating. As time passed, it became disconcerting to find that his work apparently stood little or no chance of publication.
Robinson's position was an anomalous one—a practicing poet whose work was unpublishable acting in the role of critic to poets whose work was obviously marketable. The irony and humor of it did not escape him, and his feelings were a mixture of envy and admiration toward his successful friends. The situation caused him to take a sharp critical look at his own work, completed and in progress. There is no question of Robinson's awareness of the contemporary poetic scene, his own consciousness of what he was doing, and the chance he was taking. Moody's Raphael and Uriel and Miss Peabody's Marlowe were, he knew, far removed from the Captain, Killigrew, and the learned Plunket. For Robinson the question was whether, from such unpromising material, he could produce a modern poem and a work of art—a kind of Aristophanic antimasque, individual, contemporary, and timeless.
Characteristically wary, he was both bold and defensive in his remarks about “Captain Craig.” He knew the kind of attack he would be subject to, and he tried to protect himself beforehand. When he had completed “Captain Craig,” he notified Miss Peabody “that the thing is ‘done,’” and that he was “not altogether afraid of it.” He hoped she did not suspect him of criticizing her “with any unconsciousness” of his “own failings,” and then continued: “I fear I have tried to do too many things—tried to cook too many things in one dish—and I am a bit afraid that ‘my readers’ will not believe that I have tried very much to do anything” (May 9, 1900).16 In September, after the manuscript had been returned from Scribner's, he wrote again to Miss Peabody: “In ‘Captain Craig,’ I did whatever I liked; and I'm beginning to fear that the self consciousness in the thing, rather than the prosiness … will prove to be its worst obstacle. You will like it in places, but in other places
While “Captain Craig” was on the road, Robinson worked on the shorter pieces that he originally planned to publish as a separate volume. Some of these he sent to Miss Peabody and to others, soliciting criticism and responding in turn. He sent “The Old Maid,” later retitled “Aunt Imogen,” to Miss Peabody, with the remark: “I doubt if you will care for much for [= of] it, but I should like your opinion. Don't be afraid to pound it, if necessary” (October 8, 1900). Although she was critical in her response, she did not touch on one aspect that Robinson suspected was at least part of the reason that his work was unacceptable to contemporary editors: “I was most afraid you would descend on it for its prosaic quality. When it comes to this, I fear, I have a trick of skating along the ragged edge of the impossible and not infrequently of breaking through” (October 23, 1900).
As “Captain Craig” made the rounds of the publishers, Robinson's references to it changed. Referred to initially as “The Pauper” and “The Captain,” it became “the long thing” and then “the Serpent” and “the Incubus.” He wanted more than anything to get it off his hands, but he would not repudiate it. When it appeared for a time that Small, Maynard and Company might publish it, Robinson wrote to Josephine Preston Peabody: “… I am glad at any rate that you like it. I know well enough that the majority will not like it, and that is the thing that makes me fear that it may be a tour of something rather than a legitimate poem. I do not really think that either, for my definition of poetry includes almost everything. There is nothing new in this attitude, I know, but I'm afraid there is something new in my blank verse—maybe a little too new. But the thing is written, and I doubt if I change it very much. With all its crudities, or whatever you choose to call them, the book as a whole is pretty much what I intended it to be, and I am willing—if occasion requires any such performance on my part—to put my long-tailed name on the title page” (November 2, 1900). A few months later, he wrote again, reaffirming his belief in his “twentieth century comedy”: “I am aware that the Captain is a pretty strong ‘dose’ to put forth in the name of poetry, but if I find poetry in him I don't know why I should pretend that I don't, or that I am afraid to stand by him.” Then, with prophetic accuracy, he added: “He will be hooted at, if he is noticed at all, but if he does not survive the hooting he will soon disappear” (February 17, 1901).
When at last “Captain Craig” was published in 1902, Robinson's worst fears were confirmed. It was hooted at and for precisely the reasons he had predicted. The reviewer for the Critic, for example, wrote as follows:
We can but feel that the volume might have been vastly better from an artistic standpoint had the author so willed it. While there is strength, and to spare, there is also a seemingly perverse carelessness, a frequent disregard of the niceties of form. Surely if a poet has aught to say—and Mr. Robinson has clearly proven that he lacks not in matter—he owes it to his readers, if not to himself, to dress his thought in attractive attire, and not let it go slovenly clad. Blank-verse that is little more than inverted prose chopped up into lines is continually elbowing passages that are shot through with real poetic fire in this disturbing volume.17
Robinson's self-criticism at this time is both a reflection of his sensitivity to contemporary standards of poetic judgment and a validation of his artistic integrity. “Captain Craig” has survived the hooting. Perhaps it is due to the unchangeable quality of magic that is at once unmistakable and indefinable.
Notes
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William Stanley Braithwaite, “America's Foremost Poet,” Boston Evening Transcript, May 28, 1913, p. 21.
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Letter to Edith Brower, May 16, 1899, in Edwin Arlington Robinson's Letters to Edith Brower, ed. Richard Cary (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 93.
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Selected Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1940), p. 13.
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Letters to Brower, p. 70.
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Untriangulated Stars: Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson to Harry de Forest Smith, 1890-1905, ed. Denham Sutcliffe (Cambridge, Mass., 1947), pp. 295-296.
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Letters to Brower, p. 75.
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Ibid., p. 89.
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Untriangulated Stars, p. 306.
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In addition to Robinson's letters to Harry de Forest Smith and to Edith Brower, the letters to Josephine Preston Peabody are complementary to those written to William Vaughn Moody and to Daniel Gregory Mason. The letters of Robinson to Moody are in the Houghton Library at Harvard; see Edwin S. Fussell, “Robinson to Moody: Ten Unpublished Letters,” AL, XXIII (1951), 175. The letters of Robinson to Mason are in the collection of Howard G. Schmitt, Hamburg, N. Y. Most of them were published by Mason: see Yale Review, XXV (1936), 860-864 and Virginia Quarterly Review, XIII (1937), 52-69, and 223-240.
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The letters of Robinson to Miss Peabody are in the Josephine Preston Peabody Marks Collection in the Houghton Library at Harvard. Citations are used with the kind permission of Mrs. William S. Nivison and the Harvard College Library.
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Literary Review (Boston), III, No. 1 (January and February 1899), 12-13.
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Robinson is referring to “the Deacon stern and true” in R. H. Newell's humorous national anthem facetiously attributed to “John Greenleaf W———.” The first stanza reads:
My native land, thy Puritanic stock
Still finds its roots firm-bound in Plymouth
Rock,
And all thy sons unite in one grand wish—
To keep the virtues of Preserv-èd Fish.Like Miss Peabody's “motes ordainèd,” the anthem was rejected by Orpheus C. Kerr because of its “sectional bias,” which rendered “it unsuitable for use in that small margin of the world situated outside of New England.”
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Diary and Letters of Josephine Preston Peabody, ed. Christina Hopkinson Baker (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925), p. 131.
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The original title was “The Violin Not Mine.”
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“American Poetry of the Past Year,” Poet-Lore, XIII, No. 1 (1901), 123.
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In a similar vein Robinson wrote to Moody: “It [‘Captain Craig’] is pretty good stuff in its way, but I am not altogether certain that it has unity, which is the thief of time and the damnation of men. … During the past year I have invented a unity of my own, which you will have a chance to inspect when the book is out. I call the book funny, but you may call it prosaic. I call it funny because it begins with a line that will not scan (so I am told) and ends with a brass band.” Letter to Moody, May 2, 1900, in Fussell, p. 177.
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Critic, XLII, No. 3 (March 1903), 232.
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