[In the following excerpt, Weirick assesses Robinson's place in the pantheon of great American poets, concluding that Robinson and his contemporary, Robert Frost, are craftsmen rather than geniuses. Additionally, the critic examines “Richard Cory,” and argues that the mysterious distance between Cory and his neighbors mirror Robinson's own perceived distance from the rest of humanity.]

To step from [Robert] Frost to [Edwin Arlington] Robinson is to go from rural New England to the cultivated environment of a cosmopolitan recluse in the city of New York. Yet though its material changes, Robinson's world, like Frost's, is quiet and sometimes tired, disregarding wearily very much of the tumult of the times. Instead of Frost's simple world, Robinson offers us a world of art, of subtlety, of libraries and books, of curious cultivated persons of immaculate clothes and interesting psychology. He is a poet of infinite polish, infinite care, and impeccable reserve. In him we have less nature and more art. I am not sure that we have more poetry.

The steady level of his poetry may be matched by the steadiness of his career. Since 1890 he has lived in New York, a bachelor, carefully eschewing wealth and easy occupations, always the serious and diligent, somewhat shy artist. He has, indeed, lived for poetry and nothing else, and the result is to-day a collected volume of six hundred pages. In spite of the assistance of Mr. Roosevelt some years ago, Mr. Robinson has never succeeded in impressing himself on the general American public. His fame has been of slow growth, and with the few. The question arises, how much of a success is it; and how much of it is apt to endure?

And first let us say that as a poet of New York, he does not express the multifariousness of New York, and as a descendent of New England, he expresses little or nothing of its various spirit or scene. His is rather a library culture. Much of his poetry is but the warmings over of English literature, of Malory and Tennyson and the Arthurian legend, and is devoid of reference to the contemporary and the actual. And these retellings are not, be it said, usually very interesting or very important, though they often have in them passages of finish and beauty. One marvels at the unflagging effort spent on Merlin, or on Captain Craig, but with the best will in the world attention flags. Lancelot, his best long poem, is fine writing, exquisite, and in some of its flights, shot full of wonder and romantic longing. But even here some of the faults of the other long poems appear. An oversubtlety, an obscurity in allusion, a minute attention to the psychology of characters which are but dimly adumbrated in the reader's consciousness, and no very stirring narrative to rouse or hold attention, all these are faults and obvious ones, which neither these nor any other poems can afford to stagger under. It is useless to deny it, most of Robinson's longer works are dull, and will not, like Browning, to whom Robinson has often been compared in obscurity and subtlety, repay the reader with pearls of pleasure for his deep diving into their waters.

What then may the reader who takes a seat by the library fire with this poet expect? Is it worth while? I for one think it is, and for the sake of perhaps a dozen short poems, and a point of view. Let us imagine the setting. It is that of a fireside room done in brown tones, quiet and rich with human meanings. Our host a reserved, though quietly genial scholar and poet, intent on contemplation of life and its motives and mysteries. Not that we get the impression that our host has himself lived much of life. That question does not at first arise. Himself he keeps in the background, well subdued into the brown tones of the study. He is the detached observer. And the life he observes is, therefore, also always a little detached and mysterious. Of his hero, Richard Cory, for instance, the impeccable person who committed suicide, the poet knows only what a neighbor might know; and of Flammonde, only of his good deeds and that there was a heart to his mystery never quite solved. Indeed, as we sit and hear our host descant on these former neighbors of his, glossing his comments with the high illumination of Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, and teasing us with touches of beauty and elusiveness, the thought suddenly strikes one that the host is after all quite as much a mystery as any he has discovered. And we find ourselves thinking: yes, but what of you? Why have you not lived more than to sit here and contemplate these odd people? And when we arrive there, we are already one with the host, and are in the mood to produce, psychologically at least, one of Mr. Robinson's best poems. For all his best poems are about men who were in some sense mysterious. The point of view, therefore, which the visitor at Mr. Robinson's fire will acquire is that of the romance in human motive. It is perhaps his chief contribution to his time.

These romances, or mysteries of character, which his best verses celebrate may be briefly indicated. Flammonde, for instance, is the modern Christ, a man who never himself succeeded, but who at the right points touched other lives vitally into success. What devil at his heart gnawed him out of the destinies that were his right we are left to conjecture. “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford,” shows Jonson ruminating, and striving to unravel the heart of Shakespeare's mystery. In “The Master,” Lincoln appears, “Laconic—and Olympian,” and in “Calverly's,” the snows of oblivion gradually eliminate all that was once so loving and lovely in the lives of the old charmed circle which the poet knew, a circle, like most, of evanescent Bohemians, haunting, delightful, and now no more to earth than the dead moons of Ilion. Such a list could be impressively extended, and it is, I think, important in its ability to let us into the poet's psychology. His are the passions of reminiscence, of observation, repression, and leisure, in short the passions of the studious observer, and not of the full-blooded liver of life. And so the secondary and derivative character of his poetry becomes clear, and it is easy to see why his successes are of so limited a nature. He has taken his stand as an observer and questioner, rather than as a partaker, and so he turns naturally to those careers and characters that are, like his own, romantic, aloof, and somewhat homeless.

But these mysteries of character, aurad as they are with the dim halo of futility, are not always sad. Sometimes they compass a humorous futility, sometimes the emphasis is intellectual, a puzzle, and sometimes as in “Calverly's,” the futility is that of a friendly and pathetic romanticism. “Miniver Cheevy” is, for instance, a fine satire on the æsthetic-sham hero who longed for a distant romance in Thebes and Camelot, but who made drink instead of poetry his New York anodyne. “Uncle Ananias” glorifies charmingly a romantic liar; and “Old King Cole” adds unction to reserve in giving us a portrait of the old Dutch hedonist whose continental repose not even his wicked sons could shake. Then in a more romantic vein, “Flammonde” gives us the royal vagabond who is a prince of peace, who has the gift to live in the world, nor care for its follies, be human, and yet glimpse for others at least some of life's ultimate horizons. He escapes from life without disaster, even though he is a kind of benevolent Wandering Jew, mysterious, and hiding his secret under a mask. We have a teasing hint that such benefactors do not usually escape crucifixion.

“Rarely at once will nature give
The power to be Flammonde and live,”

though why their benefactions should meet with such a return, I for one do not know. In a cooler romantic vein is that polished tragedy “Richard Cory,” the man about town, rich, “clean-favored,” “imperially slim,” a man apparently without a flaw or grief, who yet one calm summer night, much to the world's surprise, and the reader's horror,

“Went home and put a bullet through his head.”

Why? That is for us to wonder. Perhaps the empty glitter of perfection filled him, or some secret horror seized on his mind and oppressed him, or it may be that he needed a flaw or sin to live by—we are left in doubt. To me, however, the greatest of Robinson's poems is “Calverly's,” a poem fine and friendly with the wines of romance, and the pathos of old friendships gone, and the mystery and doubt that awaits the dreamers of this world. It seems to me richer, and more freighted with passion than any of the others.

We go no more to Calverly's,
For there the lights are few and low;
And who are there to see by them,
Or what they see, we do not know.
Poor strangers of another tongue
May now creep in from anywhere,
And we, forgotten, be no more
Than twilight on a ruin there.
We two, the remnant. All the rest
Are cold and quiet. You nor I,
Nor fiddle now, nor flagon-lid,
May ring them back from where they lie.
No fame delays oblivion
For them, but something yet survives:
A record written fair, could we
But read the book of scattered lives.
There'll be a page for Leffingwell,
And one for Lingard, the moon-calf;
And who knows what for Clavering,
Who died because he couldn't laugh?
Who knows or cares? No sign is here,
No face, no voice, no memory:
No Lingard with his eerie joy,
No Clavering, no Calverly.
We cannot have them here with us
To say where their light lives are gone,
Or if they be of other stuff
Than are the moons of Ilion.
So, be their place of one estate
With ashes, echoes, and old wars,—
Or ever we be of the night,
Or we be lost among the stars.

Yet those who read Robinson long, will feel in him, I think, as in Frost, a certain narrowness and stinginess. In him there is certainly not God's plenty, not perhaps even New York's plenty. As a critic of life we must feel his inadequacy, and as a poet his ineffectual sterility. Passion certainly is not his, but in its place resignation, reserve, smooth irony, and at best a dim romantic wonder at the idleness of fate. He has perhaps avoided danger, and has lived frugally on his income—but his is the fate of all those who prefer safety to adventure and a chance of ruin; he will not greatly endow his descendants at his decease. Nevertheless, though he lacks opulence, he has set standards of workmanship that achieve distinction, and has given us in a dozen of his poems, worth that will not quickly cease.

In the line of years Frost and Robinson more closely resemble the albuminous Victorians than they do our poets of a national or naturalistic bent. Whitman's mystical ecstasy, his confidence in the universe has never caught them; nor do they thrill with Moody's passion for social justice, or experience with him the soul-transforming mystery of Good Friday Night. To the higher reaches of spiritual joy, to the wider meanings of national destiny, Frost and Robinson seem quite indifferent, or at least skeptical. The excitements of life they have waved aside to consult its calms. And so we see them carrying on the great traditions of English poetry, but with the left hand: in New England, Frost, submerged in the personal world of man and nature, vacuously idle, a mere swinger of birches; and in New York, Robinson, submerged in the fastidious, in the subtleties of books and men, a frugal, though friendly futilitarian, burning in his study a candle that is almost done.

References

Though much of the criticism of the latest poets is in book reviews and magazine articles, and must be sought in The Reader's Guide to periodicals, the following works will prove indispensable to the reader of modern verse:

Poetry Magazine, 1912-1923.

Jessie B. Rittenhouse's Little Book of Modern Verse and Second Book of Modern Verse; The Younger American Poets.

Monroe and Henderson, The New Poetry, 1917, 1923.

Louis Untermeyer, The New Era in American Poetry; American Poetry Since 1900, Holt, 1923.

Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry.

Harry Hansen, Midwest Portraits, Harcourt, Brace, 1923.