(Read in pdf format) INTRODUCTION This book derives from the conviction that Edwin Arlington Robinson was a great American poet and an exceptionally fine human being. The story of his life deserves telling and has not been told. Robinson was born December 22, 1869, at Head Tide, Maine, and died in New York City on April 5, 1935. He grew up during the latter days of the Victorians -- Tennyson, Browning, Arnold -- in England and the Fireside Poets -- Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant -- in the United States. But the energy was waning, and by the turn of the century most poetry had degenerated into prettified evocations of the natural world. From the start, Robinson declared his independence from that genteel tradition. A few others joined him, among them in England A. E. Housman, whose A Shropshire Lad appeared in the same year -- 1896 -- as EAR's first volume, The Torrent and the Night Before. Among the British poets Robinson most admired, Housman (1859-1935) was a decade older than he, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) a generation his senior, and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) his near contemporary. Robinson, who was to become our first truly modern poet, goes back a long way in time. When he died in 1935, Robinson reigned as the nation's leading poet. "With the death of Edwin Arlington Robinson," the New York Times editorial declared, "America has lost not only one of the finest poets of our time, but one who ranked with the great poets of the past." Robinson was the only poet of his time and place, the Washington Evening Star observed, whose name could "be associated with the very greatest names in the history of letters." From newspapers around the country came similar encomiums reflecting patriotic pride in his accomplishment: he was the nation's "preeminent poet," our "most distinguished poet." That was 1935. Over the succeeding seventy years, Robinson's reputation has declined. True, there was a flurry of attention during his centenary in 1969. Then three separate volumes of selections of his poems appeared in the 1990s, making his best work -- the short- to medium-length poems -- more easily available to the reading public than it had been for years. This state of affairs did not last for long; only one of these collections remains in print. Hence it remains compelling to reiterate Donald Hall's plea in The Essential Robinson (1994), for restoration of EAR to the American pantheon. Robinson's reputation, it seems clear, declined in the wake of the triumph of such modernist poets as Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams. Unlike them, Robinson remained devoted all his life to traditional forms. His poetry on the page came to look almost old-fashioned in its use of meter and rhyme. Yet, as Hall pointed out, that twentieth century generation of great modern poets actually began with Robinson "in his realism or honesty, and his relentless care for the art of poetic language." Robinson's strongest partisans still are found among fellow poets like Hall and Robert Mezey, editor of the Modern Library's 1999 volume of Robinson poems. One example: During a June 2003 heat wave in Paris, the poet W. S. Merwin, winner of both the Pulitzer and Bollingen prizes, read from his poems in a crowded upstairs room at the Village Voice bookshop in Saint Germain des Pres. With the windows open, Merwin had to compete with traffic noises, but the ease of his manner and the grace of his poetry commanded the attention of a sweaty audience. Afterwards, books were signed and questions asked. "Were you influenced by Robinson?" someone asked Merwin. Without a second's hesitation, he began reciting "Reuben Bright," one of Robinson's best early sonnets. Because he was a butcher, and thereby Did earn an honest living (and did right), I would not have you think that Reuben Bright Was anymore a brute than you or I; 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 that night, And made the women cry to see him cry. And after she was dead, and he had paid The singers and the sexton and the rest, He packed... Here Merwin stalled momentarily, looking for the rhyme, and the woman poet next in line to have her book signed spoke up to provide it. ... a lot of things that she had made... That was all Merwin needed. He sailed on to the end, declaiming the final couplet in triumph. Most mournfully away in an old chest Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house. "Does that answer your question?" he said. Great writers must find their distinctive voice, and you can hear Robinson's in "Reuben Bright" (1897). He uses simple rhetoric, the emotion compressed in spare language. As the poet Winfield Townley Scott observed in his notebooks, there are basically two kinds of poetry. One is represented by Hart Crane's line "The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise," the other by Robinson's "And he was all alone there when he died." One is a magic gesture of language, the other "a commentary on human life so concentrated as to give off considerable pressure." The greatest poets combine the two, Scott believed: Shakespeare often, Robinson himself now and then. When Robinson wrote, it was in a way manifestly his own. His work is highly susceptible to parody, like that of most major writers. What was new about him, as Archibald MacLeish wrote in 1969, was the speaker, "the Voice" whose tone, touched by irony, suggests truths about his characters (and about ourselves) that we almost but don't quite recognize. "We don't despair -- not quite -- and neither does Robinson," MacLeish commented. "His is the after voice, the evening voice, and... we know the thing it means." Robinson used that voice to present a new subject matter. He was the first of our poets to write about ordinary people and events. No one before his time would have thought it possible to write sonnets about an honest butcher consumed by grief, about a miser with "eyes like little dollars in the dark," about ancient clerks in a dry goods store measuring out their days like bolts of cloth. When Robinson did so in his earliest book, he opened the door for other poets to follow. His best work looks closely at the people around him, exploring for secrets within. In 1926 Ben Ray Redman called him "a biographer of souls... bound to humanity by the dual bond of sympathy and humor." Time and again, his poems insist that we cannot really know others, that we do not even know ourselves. Yet Robinson was uncannily perceptive, and we come away from regarding his portraits with a glimmer of understanding. As he himself put it, "poetry is a language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said." In "Calverly's," an elegiac 1907 poem, Robinson laments the passing of former companions at a New York City tavern. They had not amounted to much, as judged by worldly standards, yet he will not let them go unremarked. No fame delays oblivion For them, but something yet survives: A record written fair, could we But read the book of scattered lives. Usually he took for his subjects those who had failed in life and love. He wrote about the derelict and downtrodden, the old and bereft. Who wanted to read about successful aldermen, anyway? Those who led "scattered lives" interested him, not least because for a long time he thought of himself as one of them. Recognition came late to Robinson. He spent two decades struggling to get his poems published, surviving on the edge of poverty. Drink and depression dogged his days, yet he was sustained by a persistent belief in his calling -- that he had been put on the earth to write poems. It was the only thing he could do, and he meant to do it, no matter how few seemed to notice. In a 1952 libel on poets of his generation, Edmund Wilson maintained that they had too much time on their hands. As a consequence, they formed into groups to engage in "debates, practical jokes and fierce battles" that kept them in a state of excitement. Wilson had a point, for the physical and mental labor of setting poems down on paper hardly qualifies as a full-time occupation. When Teddy Roosevelt provided Robinson with a sinecure at the New York Custom House from 1905 to 1909, it was almost as if the free hours prevented him from getting poems written. "Work with me," he said at the time, "means studying the ceiling and my navel for four hours and then writing down perhaps four lines-sometimes seven and then again none at all." But Robinson did not use the time to join organizations, and he was never drawn into the squabbling of literary factions. All his life he remained very much his own man. It was not that he didn't care what others thought of his poetry. A bad review could summon despondency and a good one inspire him to make a friend of the reviewer. He felt a kinship for anyone who understood and liked what he had written. They had in common, after all, a mutual respect for the power and importance of language. For him, as for Henry in Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing, it was the words that mattered. Writers were not sacred, but words were. If you got the right ones in the right order, you could "make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead." That was what Robinson was after. Though utterly unwilling to indulge in advertisements for himself, he was tremendously ambitious about his poetry. "I don't expect recognition while I live," he said early in his career, "but if I thought I could write something that would go on living after I'm gone, I'd be satisfied with an attic and a crust all my life." When critical and popular success finally did come his way, he was wary of the praise. Only time -- perhaps a century -- would determine whether his poems would survive. "If you will look in on me sometime in the summer of 2026," he wrote a friend from the MacDowell Colony on August 20, 1926, "I may be able to tell you whether my things are going to last." Robinson also realized that there was no necessary connection between genius and character. In correspondence with older women such as Lilla Cabot Perry and Laura E. Richards, he found himself defending the behavior of great artists of the past. Lord Byron "was a bounder, no doubt, but his heritage accounts for a good deal." Richard Wagner "could not possibly have found the time to be so wicked as his enemies would have him." Yet even if the enemies were right, what did it matter? Wagner "left the world a different place for his having lived in it -- which is a good deal for one neurotic little man to do." What he could easily forgive in others, Robinson could not countenance in himself. Enough of his Puritan heritage remained to guide him both toward his calling and toward a life of kindness and charity. He cared deeply for his family and friends. As troubles threatened to overtake them, Robinson came to their aid with sympathy and understanding, money and counsel. He had a knack for anticipating and untangling the most intricate of emotional complications. Time and again he served as a fixer, one whose insights helped relieve those in distress. When Robinson died, a number of his friends insisted on his greatness as a man as well as a poet. "Most great artists are great only in their art," as one of them observed. Another thought him the best man he had ever known. ... COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Published by Columbia University Press and copyrighted © 2007 by Scott Donaldson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. For more information, send e-mail to cw270@columbia.edu Excerpted from Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life by Scott Donaldson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
