E. A. Robinson
Essays
From a letter to Harry de Forest Smith (dated Gardiner, March 15, 1897)
ROBINSON AT 30
How long do you think a man can live in hell? I think he can live there a good many years--a hundred, perhaps, if his bowels keep in decent order--but he isn't going to have a very good time. No man can have a very good time--of the right sort, at any rate--until he understands things; and how the devil is a man to understand things in an age like this, when the whole trend of popular thought is in the wrong direction-- not only that, but proud of the way it is taking? The age is all right, material progress is all right, Herbert Spencer is all right, hell is all right. These things are temporal necessities, but they are damned uninteresting to one who can get a glimpse of the real light through the clouds of time. It is that glimpse that makes me wish to live and see it out. If it were not for that glimpse, I should be tempted, as Tennyson used to be, to stick my nose into a rag soaked with chloroform and be done with it--that is, if I could screw up the courage. But now, thank God, that is not the kind of courage I am praying for; what I am after is the courage to see and to believe that my present life is the best thing for me, and that every man has it in his power to overcome whatever obstacles may be in his way--even that seeming obstacle we call by the name of Death. I have not said much about my life for the past three years--I mean the past ten--because with all its lack of anything like material hope and pleasure--it was tolerable. For all my long lean face, I never gave up; and I never shall give up. I can't do it; but I can suffer like damnation, which shows there is something wrong with me somewhere. The past three months of my life, however, are quite another thing. If they had come two years ago, or even one, I think they would have finished me. The book has helped me out a little--in fact, I was rather bewildered by its reception-- but that counts (the praise, I mean) for very little. There are things here at home that are pulling me back, and I've got to look out for them. I can't get away, just now--I don't see how I can for a year--and the result is that all my best strength is required in keeping my thoughts in some sort of rational order. The one great pleasure of my life is the knowledge that my poor mother is out of it. I can't quite understand--yet--the laws of compensation that make a woman suffer what she did and from so many causes. We say she died of diphtheria. What does that mean? It means just this: she had endured all [she] could and was ready to die. I had been watching it for a year. If she had not had diphtheria, or membranous croup, or whatever it was that took her off so hellishly, she would have gone crazy. I am not going crazy, for I see some things she did not see--some things she could not see; but I am going to lose all those pleasures which are said to make up the happiness of this life and I'm glad of it. I'm glad to say that I am strong enough to do without them. There is a pleasure--a job--this is greater than all these little selfish notions and I have found the way to it through idealism. Once I thought I was in a way to be a Christian Scientist, but that will be impossible. The system is too dependent on unsubstantial inferences. As it is taught and managed it is not Christianity, though the claim is that the two terms are synonymous. It is rapidly developing into a sect, and one that will have a tremendous power in the world; but it is only a stepping stone to the truth. It has proved the power, however, of even a partial recognition, and thereby proved the utter fallacy of all existing notions of religion--popular notions, I mean.
The great scholars of the world are for the most part spiritual imbeciles, and there is where the trouble lies. The willingness "to be a child again" comes hard--so hard that it will never come to many who are in the world today. That is not what they are here for. "The world was made in order, and the atoms march in time." It is a damned queer time to us who are here now; but it is all right and we are all going to hear it as it is-- when the mortal wax gets out of our ears.[ . . ].
From a letter to L. N. Chase (from Peterborough, July 11, 1917)
ROBINSON AT 50
I find it rather difficult to answer your letter, much as I appreciate it and your motive in writing it. I am handicapped at the start in having no biography and no theories. You will find as much in Who's Who as I have to say about myself personally; and as for my work, I have hoped that it might speak--not very loudly, perhaps--for itself. Ten years ago I was called a radical, and most readers looked sideways at my work on account of its unconventional use of so-called simple language. I suppose that I have always depended rather more on context than on vocabulary for my poetical effects, and this offense has laid me open to the charge of over-subtlety on the part of the initiated and of dullness on the part of the dull. Whatever merit my work may or may not possess, I fancy that it will always be a waste of time for any reader who has not a fairly well developed sense of humor--which, as someone has said before, is a very serious thing--to bother with it. When I tell you that my poem called "The Gift of God" (in The Man Against the Sky) has been interpreted as a touching tribute to our Saviour, you will require no further comment upon this point.
When I was younger, I was very much under the influence of Wordsworth and Kipling, but never at all, so far as I am aware, under that of Browning, as many seem to believe. As a matter of fact, I have never been able to understand the alleged resemblance unless it can be attributed to my use of rather more colloquial language than "poetic diction" has usually sanctioned. I began the writing of verse long before I was old enough to know better, and I fancy that I am safe in saying that my style, such as it is, was pretty well formed by the time my first book was published, in 1896.
As for my methods of work, there does not seem to be much for me to say. As a rule I see the end of a thing before I begin it (if I don't see it then, I am likely never to see itl) and the rest of the process is simply a matter of how the thing goes. .Sometimes it goes rapidly, sometimes slowly; and so far as I can see, one method produces about the same result as the other, provided I know what I am trying to say. When occasionally I have become disgusted and thrown an unfinished poem away, it has always been because I had really nothing to write about. I have written a sonnet in twenty minutes as a joke ("Another Dark Lady") and I have tinkered others ("The Clerks" for example) for a month. Generally speaking, I should be inclined to say that if some sort of first draft doesn't form itself rather quickly, the final product is likely to unsatisfactory; but with something definite and worth while to work on, any amount of labor may justify itself. Again, it may not. I imagine, however, that the worst poetry in the world has been written in the finest frenzy of inspiration; and so, probably, has the best.
When you ask me to annotate individual poems, I find myself in another difficulty. While nearly everything that I have written has a certain amount of personal coloring, I do not recall anything of mine that is a direct transcription of experience. For example, I have never liked the sound of church-bells; and the sound of their ringing one evening for the wedding of two people in whom I had not the remotest interest brought about a mood in me that made me write "On the Night of a Friend's Wedding"--a sonnet, by the way, that was begun suddenly, and later worked over for an immoderate length of time. But I was younger then than I am now, and time didn't count.
I thought nothing when I was writing my first book of working for a week over a single line; and while I don't do it any more, I am sure that my technique is better for those early grilling exercises. In fact, I am now more than inclined to believe that the technical flabbiness of many writers is due to the lack in earlier years of just such grilling--in the years when one is not conscious of how hard he is working and of how much time he is wasting--unless he is ready to gamble his life away for the sake of winning the possible conjunction of a few inevitable words. It seems an odd stake to play for so heavily, and perhaps it is fortunate for the race that so few are playing for it. Of course almost everyone is writing verse nowadays, but not many are taking it seriously enough to let it interfere with their meal tickets. [ . . ].
(THE FOLLOWING ESSAY BY THE AMERICAN POET JAMES DICKEY (1923-97) WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS THE INTRODUCTION TO SELECTED POEMS OF EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON (NORTON DAUWEN ZABEL, ED.), NEW YORK: MACMILLAN, 1965. IT IS REPRODUCED HERE IN ITS ENTIRETY.)
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON: THE MANY TRUTHS
A reevaluation of the work of a poet as established as Edwin Arlington Robinson should involve us in some of the fundamentals we tend to forget when we read any poetry that happens to come to hand--the poetry that is thrust upon us by critics and in courses in literature as well as the poetry that we seek out or return to. As should be true of our encounter with any poetry, reevaluation requires that we rid ourselves of preconceptions and achieve, if we can, a way of reading an established poet as though we had never heard of him and were opening his book for the first time. It requires that we approach him with all our senses open, our intelligence in acute readiness, our critical sense in check but alert for the slightest nuance of falsity, our truth-sensitive needle--the device that measures what the poet says against what we know from having lived it--at its most delicate, and our sense of the poet's "place," as determined by commentary, textbook, and literary fashion, drugged, asleep, or temporarily dead.
Like most ideal conditions, this one cannot be fully attained. But it is certainly true that an approximation of such a state is both an advantage and a condition productive of unsuspected discoveries in reading poets we thought we knew, particularly poets whom we thought we knew as well as Robinson. In Robinson's special case it is even more difficult than usual, for the course of poetry has to a certain extent turned away from him, making his greatet virtues appear mediocre ones and directing public scrutiny from his introspective, intellectual, and ironic verse toward poetry in which more things seem to be taking place in a smaller area--poetry in which the poetic line is compressed and packed to the point of explosion and the bedazzlement of the reader is considered synonymous with his reward.
Robinson achieved unusual popularity in his lifetime. When he died in 1935, at the age of sixty-five, he had won the Pulitzer Prize three times and had gained a distinction rare for a poet--his book-length poem Tristram had become a best seller. But in the public mind, Robinson has during recent years been regarded as only his vices of prolixity, irresolution, and occasional dullness would have him. Yet if we could manage to read Robinson as if we did not know him--or at least as if we did not know him quite so well as we had believed--or if we could come to him as if he were worth rereading, not out of duty and obedience to literary history but as a possible experience, we would certainly gain a good deal more than we would lose.
I
Suppose, eager only for the experience of poems, we were to look through this book before reading it, noting only the shapes of the poems on the page. We would see a good many short, tight-looking poems in different structural forms, all of them severely symmetrical, and page after page containing long vertical rectangles of blank verse. Though this selection leaves out the Arthurian poems on which Robinson's popular reputation was made as well as the other later narratives of his declining years, there are still a number of middling-long poems that no editor interested in Robinson s best work could possibly eliminate. The chances are that we would be inclined to skip these and first read one of the shorter ones. What would we find if it were this one?
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,
Ñor 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.
It is a poem that opens, conventionally enough, with a reference to a place--one suspects from the beginning that it is one of those drinking places where men gather against the dark and call it fellowship--where there were once parties or at least conviviality of some sort; of that company, only two are left, and one of these is speaking. We feel the conventionality of the theme because we are aware that the contrast between places formerly full of animation and merriment with the same places now is one of the most haggard of romantic clichés and the subject of innumerable medi¬ocre verses (though infrequently, as in some of Hardy, it can be memorable and can serve to remind us that such contrasts, such places, do in fact exist and are melancholy and cautionary). Yet there is a difference, a departure, slight but definitive, from the conventional. This difference begins to become apparent as we read the last two stanzas, which are mainly a roll call of the missing. The Robinsonian departure is in the way in which these dead are characterized. What, for example, are we to make of the refer¬ence to "Clavering/Who died because he couldn't laugh?" Or of "Lingard with his eerie joy"? What of these people, here barely mentioned, but mentioned in connection with tantalizing qualities that are hard to forget, that have in them some of the inexplicably sad individuality that might be--that might as well be--fate? I suspect that one who began as even the most casual reader might wish to know more of these people, and he might then realize that in Robinson's other poems, and only there, he would have a chance of doing so.
A first perusal of "Calverly's" might also lead the perceptive reader to suspect that the poet is more interested in the human personality than he is in, say, nature; that he is interested in people not only for their enigmatic and haunting qualities but also for their mysterious exemplification of some larger entity, some agency that, though it determines both their lives and their deaths, may or may not have any concern for them or knowledge of them. Of these men, the poet cannot say "where their light lives are gone," and because he cannot say--and because there is nothing or no way to tell him--he cannot know, either, what his own fate is, or its meaning; he can know only that he himself was once at Calverly's, that the others who were there are gone, and that he shall follow them in due time. He cannot say what this means or whether, in fact, it means anything. Though he can guess as to what it might mean, all he finally knows is what has happened.
This condition of mind is a constant throughout all but a very few of Robinson's poems. It links him in certain curious ways with the existentialists, but we are aware of such affinities only tangentially, for Robinson's writings, whatever else they may be, are dramas that make use of conjecture rather than overt statements of ideas held and defended. It is the fact that truth is "so strange in its nakedness" that appalled and intrigued him--the fact that it takes different forms for different people and different situations. Robinson believed in the unknowable constants that govern the human being from within; in addition, he had the sort of mind that sees history as a unity in which these human constants appear in dramatic form. This explains why he had no difficulty at all in projecting Welsh kingdoms and biblical encounters out of houses and situations he had known in New England, much as his own Shakespeare was able to fill "Ilion, Rome, or any town you like/Of olden time with timeless Englishmen."
The unity of the poet's mind is a quality that is certain to make its presence felt very early in the reader's acquaintance with Robinson. One can tell a great deal about him from the reading of a single poem. All the poems partake of a single view and a single personality, and one has no trouble in associating the poems in strict forms with the more irregular ones as the products of the same vision of existence. The sensibility evidenced by the poems is both devious and tenacious, and it lives most intensely when unresolved about questions dealing with the human personality. Robinson is perhaps the greatest master of the speculative or conjectural approach to the writing of poetry. Uncertainty was the air he breathed, and speculation was not so much a device with him--though at its best it is a surpassingly effective technique--as it was a habit of mind, an integral part of the self. As with most powerful poets, the writing proceeded from the way in which Robinson naturally thought, the way he naturally was, and so was inextricably rooted in his reticent, slightly morbid, profoundly contemplative, solitary, compassionate, and stoical personality and was not the product of a conscious search for a literary "way," an unusual manner of speaking which was invented or discovered and in which the will had a major part.
Robinson's tentative point of view was solidly wedded to a style that has exactly the same characteristics as his mind. It makes an artistic virtue, and often a very great one, of arriving at only provisional answers and solutions, of leaving it up to the reader's personality--also fated--to choose from among them the most likely. Thus a salient quality of Robinson's work is the extraordinary roundness and fullness he obtains from such circumlocutions of his subjects, as though he were indeed turning (in William James's phrase) "the cube of reality." One is left with the belief that in any given situation there are many truths--as many, so to speak, as there are persons involved, as there are witnesses, as there are ways of thinking about it. And encompassing all these is the shadowy probability that none of them is or can be final. What we see in Robinson's work is the unending and obsessional effort to make sense of experience when perhaps there is none to be made. The poet, the reader, all of us are members of humanity in the sense Robinson intended when he characterized the earth as "a kind of vast spiritual kindergarten where millions of people are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks."
It is through people that Robinson found the hints and gleams of the universal condition that he could not help trying to solve. Like other human beings, he was cursed with intelligence and sensibility in a universe made for material objects. "The world is a hell of a place," he once said, "but the universe is a fine thing," and again, "We die of what we eat and drink,/But more we die of what we think." Robinson has been perhaps the only American poet--certainly the only one of major status--interested exclusively in human beings as subject matter for poetry--in the psychological, motivational aspects of living, in the inner life as it is projected upon the outer. His work is one vast attempt to tell the stories that no man can really tell, for no man can know their real meaning, their real intention, or even whether such exists, though it persistently appears to do so. In all Robinson's people the Cosmos seems to be brooding in one way or another, so that a man and woman sitting in a garden, as in "Mortmain," are, in what they are, exemplars of eternal laws that we may guess at but not know. The laws are present in psychological constitutions as surely as they are in physical materials, in the orbital patterns of stars and planets and atoms, only deeper hid, more tragic and mysterious, "as there might somewhere be veiled/Eternal reasons why the tricks of time/Were played like this." Robinson wrote an enormous amount of poetry (how one's mind quails at the sheer weight, the physical bulk, of his fifteen-hundred-page Collected Poems!), but at the center of it and all through it is the Personality, the Mind, conditioned by its accidental placement in time and space--these give the individuations that make drama possible--but also partaking of the hidden universals, the not-to-be-knowns that torment all men. In these poems "The strange and unremembered light/That is in dreams" plays over "The nameless and eternal tragedies/That render hope and hopelessness akin." Like a man speaking under torture--or self-torture--Robinson tells of these things, circling them, painfully shifting from one possible interpretation to another, and the reader circles with him, making, for want of any received, definitive opinion, hesitant, troubling, tentative judgments. The result is an unresolved view, but a view of remarkable richness and suggestibility, opening out in many directions and unsealing many avenues of possibility: a multidimensional view that the reader is left pondering as the poem has pondered, newly aware of his own enigmas, of what he and his own life--its incidents and fatalities--may mean, could mean, and thus he is likely to feel himself linked into the insoluble universal equation, in which nature itself is only a frame of mind, a projection of inwardness, tormenting irresolution, and occasional inexplicable calms.
It is a poem that opens, conventionally enough, with a reference to a place--one suspects from the beginning that it is one of those drinking places where men gather against the dark and call it fellowship--where there were once parties or at least conviviality of some sort; of that company, only two are left, and one of these is speaking. We feel the conventionality of the theme because we are aware that the contrast between places formerly full of animation and merriment with the same places now is one of the most haggard of romantic clichés and the subject of innumerable medi¬ocre verses (though infrequently, as in some of Hardy, it can be memorable and can serve to remind us that such contrasts, such places, do in fact exist and are melancholy and cautionary). Yet there is a difference, a departure, slight but definitive, from the conventional. This difference begins to become apparent as we read the last two stanzas, which are mainly a roll call of the missing. The Robinsonian departure is in the way in which these dead are characterized. What, for example, are we to make of the refer¬ence to "Clavering/Who died because he couldn't laugh?" Or of "Lingard with his eerie joy"? What of these people, here barely mentioned, but mentioned in connection with tantalizing qualities that are hard to forget, that have in them some of the inexplicably sad individuality that might be--that might as well be--fate? I suspect that one who began as even the most casual reader might wish to know more of these people, and he might then realize that in Robinson's other poems, and only there, he would have a chance of doing so.
A first perusal of "Calverly's" might also lead the perceptive reader to suspect that the poet is more interested in the human personality than he is in, say, nature; that he is interested in people not only for their enigmatic and haunting qualities but also for their mysterious exemplification of some larger entity, some agency that, though it determines both their lives and their deaths, may or may not have any concern for them or knowledge of them. Of these men, the poet cannot say "where their light lives are gone," and because he cannot say--and because there is nothing or no way to tell him--he cannot know, either, what his own fate is, or its meaning; he can know only that he himself was once at Calverly's, that the others who were there are gone, and that he shall follow them in due time. He cannot say what this means or whether, in fact, it means anything. Though he can guess as to what it might mean, all he finally knows is what has happened.
This condition of mind is a constant throughout all but a very few of Robinson's poems. It links him in certain curious ways with the existentialists, but we are aware of such affinities only tangentially, for Robinson's writings, whatever else they may be, are dramas that make use of conjecture rather than overt statements of ideas held and defended. It is the fact that truth is "so strange in its nakedness" that appalled and intrigued him--the fact that it takes different forms for different people and different situations. Robinson believed in the unknowable constants that govern the human being from within; in addition, he had the sort of mind that sees history as a unity in which these human constants appear in dramatic form. This explains why he had no difficulty at all in projecting Welsh kingdoms and biblical encounters out of houses and situations he had known in New England, much as his own Shakespeare was able to fill "Ilion, Rome, or any town you like/Of olden time with timeless Englishmen."
The unity of the poet's mind is a quality that is certain to make its presence felt very early in the reader's acquaintance with Robinson. One can tell a great deal about him from the reading of a single poem. All the poems partake of a single view and a single personality, and one has no trouble in associating the poems in strict forms with the more irregular ones as the products of the same vision of existence. The sensibility evidenced by the poems is both devious and tenacious, and it lives most intensely when unresolved about questions dealing with the human personality. Robinson is perhaps the greatest master of the speculative or conjectural approach to the writing of poetry. Uncertainty was the air he breathed, and speculation was not so much a device with him--though at its best it is a surpassingly effective technique--as it was a habit of mind, an integral part of the self. As with most powerful poets, the writing proceeded from the way in which Robinson naturally thought, the way he naturally was, and so was inextricably rooted in his reticent, slightly morbid, profoundly contemplative, solitary, compassionate, and stoical personality and was not the product of a conscious search for a literary "way," an unusual manner of speaking which was invented or discovered and in which the will had a major part.
Robinson's tentative point of view was solidly wedded to a style that has exactly the same characteristics as his mind. It makes an artistic virtue, and often a very great one, of arriving at only provisional answers and solutions, of leaving it up to the reader's personality--also fated--to choose from among them the most likely. Thus a salient quality of Robinson's work is the extraordinary roundness and fullness he obtains from such circumlocutions of his subjects, as though he were indeed turning (in William James's phrase) "the cube of reality." One is left with the belief that in any given situation there are many truths--as many, so to speak, as there are persons involved, as there are witnesses, as there are ways of thinking about it. And encompassing all these is the shadowy probability that none of them is or can be final. What we see in Robinson's work is the unending and obsessional effort to make sense of experience when perhaps there is none to be made. The poet, the reader, all of us are members of humanity in the sense Robinson intended when he characterized the earth as "a kind of vast spiritual kindergarten where millions of people are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks."
It is through people that Robinson found the hints and gleams of the universal condition that he could not help trying to solve. Like other human beings, he was cursed with intelligence and sensibility in a universe made for material objects. "The world is a hell of a place," he once said, "but the universe is a fine thing," and again, "We die of what we eat and drink,/But more we die of what we think." Robinson has been perhaps the only American poet--certainly the only one of major status--interested exclusively in human beings as subject matter for poetry--in the psychological, motivational aspects of living, in the inner life as it is projected upon the outer. His work is one vast attempt to tell the stories that no man can really tell, for no man can know their real meaning, their real intention, or even whether such exists, though it persistently appears to do so. In all Robinson's people the Cosmos seems to be brooding in one way or another, so that a man and woman sitting in a garden, as in "Mortmain," are, in what they are, exemplars of eternal laws that we may guess at but not know. The laws are present in psychological constitutions as surely as they are in physical materials, in the orbital patterns of stars and planets and atoms, only deeper hid, more tragic and mysterious, "as there might somewhere be veiled/Eternal reasons why the tricks of time/Were played like this." Robinson wrote an enormous amount of poetry (how one's mind quails at the sheer weight, the physical bulk, of his fifteen-hundred-page Collected Poems!), but at the center of it and all through it is the Personality, the Mind, conditioned by its accidental placement in time and space--these give the individuations that make drama possible--but also partaking of the hidden universals, the not-to-be-knowns that torment all men. In these poems "The strange and unremembered light/That is in dreams" plays over "The nameless and eternal tragedies/That render hope and hopelessness akin." Like a man speaking under torture--or self-torture--Robinson tells of these things, circling them, painfully shifting from one possible interpretation to another, and the reader circles with him, making, for want of any received, definitive opinion, hesitant, troubling, tentative judgments. The result is an unresolved view, but a view of remarkable richness and suggestibility, opening out in many directions and unsealing many avenues of possibility: a multidimensional view that the reader is left pondering as the poem has pondered, newly aware of his own enigmas, of what he and his own life--its incidents and fatalities--may mean, could mean, and thus he is likely to feel himself linked into the insoluble universal equation, in which nature itself is only a frame of mind, a projection of inwardness, tormenting irresolution, and occasional inexplicable calms.
... she could look
Right forward through the years, nor any more
Shrink with a cringing prescience to behold
The glitter of dead summer on the grass,
Or the brown-glimmered crimson of still trees
Across the intervale where flashed along,
Black-silvered, the cold river.
II
As has been said, Robinson's method--which on some fronts has been labelled antipoetic--would not amount to as much as it does were not the modes of thought presented in such powerful and disturbing dramatic forms. For an "antipoet," Robinson was an astonishing craftsman. One has only to read a few of his better poems in the classic French repetitive forms, such as "The House on the Hill," to recognize the part that traditional verse patterns play in his work. This much is demonstrable. It is among those who believe the poetic essence to lie somewhere outside or beyond such considerations, somewhere in the image-making, visual, and visionary realm, that Robinson's position has been challenged. And it is true that his verse is oddly bare, that there are few images in it--though, of these, some are very fine indeed--and that most of it is highly cerebral and often written in a scholarly or pseudoscholarly manner that is frequently more than a little pedantic. Many of his poems contain an element of self-parody, and these carry more than their share of bad, flat, stuffy writing.
emonstrating the fulfillment of unalterable schemes,
Which had been, before the cradle, Time's inexorable tenants
Of what were now the dusty ruins of their fathers' dreams.
Infrequently there is also a kind of belaboring-beyond-belaboring of the obvious:
The four square somber things that you see first
Around you are four walls that go as high
As to the ceiling.
And now and then one comes on philosophical pronouncements of a remarkable unconvincingness, demonstrating a total failure of idiom, of art:
Too much of that
May lead you by and by through gloomy lanes
To a sad wilderness, where one may grope
Alone, and always, or until he feels
Ferocious and invisible animals
That wait for men and eat them in the dark.
At his worst, Robinson seems to go on writing long after whatever he has had to say about the subject has been exhausted; there is a suspicious look of automatism about his verse instrument. The reader, being made of less stern stuff, will almost always fail before Robinson's blank verse does.
Robinson certainly wrote too much. Like Wordsworth--even more than Wordsworth, if that is possible--he is in need of selective editing. In the present book, this is what the late Morton Dauwen Zabel has done, and I believe with singular success. The Robinson of this book is much more nearly the essential, the permanently valuable Robinson than the Robinson of the Collected Poems, though there are unavoidable exclusions--particularly of the good book-length poems, such as Lancelot and Merlin--which one might legitimately regret and to which it is hoped that the reader will eventually have recourse. Yet even in the present volume one is likely to be put off by the length of many of the pieces. Then, too, if the casual reader skims only a little of a particular poem and finds that nothing much is happening or that event, action, and resolution are taking place only in various persons' minds, he is also likely to shy away. But once in the poem, committed to it, with his mind winding among the alternative complexities of Robinson's characters' minds--that is, winding with Robinson's mind--the reader changes slowly, for Robinson hath his will. One is held by the curious dry rnagic that seems so eminently unmagical, that bears no resemblance to the elfin or purely verbal or native-woodnote magic for which English.verse is so justly celebrated It is a magic for which there is very little precedent in all literature. Though external affinities may be asserted and even partially demonstrated with Praed and Browning, though there are occasional distant echoes of Words¬worth, Keats, Hardy, and Rossetti, Robinson is really like none of them in his root qualities; his spell is cast with none of the traditional paraphernalia, but largely through his own reading of character and situation and fate, his adaptation of traditional poetic devices to serve these needs--an adaptation so unexpected, so revolutionary, as to seem not so much adaptation as transformation.
Another odd thing about Robinson is that his best work and his worst are yet remarkably alike. The qualities that .make the good poems good are the same qualities that make the bad poems bad; it is only a question of how Robinson's method works out in, "takes to," the situation he is depicting, and often the difference between good, bad and mediocre is thin indeed. This difficulty is also compounded by the fact that Robinson is equally skilled as a technician in both memorable poems and trivial ones. In the less interesting poems, particularly the longer ones, Robinson's air of portentousness can be tiresome. Reading these, one is tempted to say that Robinson is the most prolific reticent poet in history. Though he gives the impression that he is reluctant to write down what he is writing, he often goes on and on, in a kind of intelligent mumbling, a poetical wringing of the hands, until the reader becomes restive and a little irritated. In these passages, Robinson's verse instrument has a certain kinship with the salt maker in the fairy tale, grinding away of its own accord at the bottom of the sea. Then there is the gray, austere landscape of the poems, the lack of background definition. One is accustomed to finding the characters in a poem--particularly a narrative poem--in a place, a location with objects and a weather of its own, a world which the reader can enter and in which he can, as it were, live with the characters. But there is very little of the environmental in Robinson's work. What few gestures and concessions he makes to the outside world are token ones; all externality is quickly devoured by the tormented intro¬version of his personages. In Robinson, the mind eats everything and converts it to part of a conflict with self; one could say with some justification that all Robinson's poems are about people who are unable to endure themselves or to resolve their thoughts into some meaningful, cleansing action. So much introversion is not only harrowing; it can also be boring, particularly when carried on to the enormous lengths in which it appears in "Matthias at the Door" and "Avon's Harvest."
And yet with these strictures, the case against Robinson's poetry has pretty much been stated, and we have on our hands what re-mains after they have been acknowledged.
III
No poet ever understood loneliness or separateness better than Robinson or knew the self-consuming furnace that the brain can become in isolation, the suicidal hellishness of it, doomed as it is to feed on itself in answerless frustration, fated to this condition by the accident of human birth, which carries with it the hunger for certainty and the intolerable load of personal recollections. He understood loneliness in all its many forms and depths and was thus less interested in its conventional poetic aspects than he was in the loneliness of the man in the crowd, or alone with his thoughts of the dead, or feeling at some unforseen time the metaphysical loneliness, the angst, of being "lost among the stars," or becoming aware of the solitude that resides in comfort and in the affection of friend and family--that desperation at the heart of what is called happiness. It is only the poet and those involved who realize the inevitability and the despair of these situations, "Although, to the serene outsider,/There still would seem to be a way."
The acceptance of the fact that there is no way, that there is nothing to do about the sadness of most human beings when they are alone or speaking to others as if to themselves, that there is nothing to offer them but recognition, sympathy, compassion, deepens Robinson's best poems until we sense in them something other than art. A thing inside us is likely to shift from where it was, and our world view to change, though perhaps only slightly, toward a darker, deeper perspective. Robinson has been called a laureate of failure and has even been accused (if that is the word) of making a cult and a virtue of failure, but that assessment is not quite accurate. His subject was "the slow tragedy of haunted men," those whose "eyes are lit with a wrong light," those who believe that some earthly occurrence in the past (and now forever impossible) could have made all the difference, that some person dead or otherwise beyond reach, some life unlived and now unlivable, could have been the answer to everything. But these longings were seen by Robinson to be the delusions necessary to sustain life, for human beings, though they can live without hope, cannot live believing that no hope ever could have existed. For this reason, many of the poems deal with the unlived life, the man kept by his own nature or by circumstance from "what might have been his," but there is always the ironic Robinsonian overtone that what might have been would not have been much better than what is--and, indeed, might well have been worse; the failure would only have had its development and setting altered somewhat, but not its pain or its inevitability.
Though Robinson's dramatic sense was powerful and often profound, his narrative sense was not. His narrative devices are few, and they are used again and again. The poet is always, for example, running into somebody in the street whom he knew under other circumstances and who is now a bum, a "slowly-freezing Santa Claus," a street-corner revivalist, or something equally comical-pathetic and cut off. The story of the person's passing from his former state to this one then becomes the poem, sometimes told by the derelict, the "ruin who meant well," and sometimes puzzled out by the poet himself, either with his deep, painful probing or, as in some of the later long poems, such as "The Man Who Died Twice," with an intolerable amount of poetical hemming and hawing, backing and filling.
And yet Robinson's peculiar elliptical vision, even when it is boring, is worth the reader's time. The tone of his voice is so distinctive, his technique so varied and resourceful, and his com¬passion so intense that something valuable comes through even the most wasteful of his productions. Not nearly enough has been made of Robinson's skill, the chief thing about which is that it is able to create, through an astonishing number of forms and subjects, the tone of a single voice, achieving variety within a tonal unity. And it is largely in this tone, the product of outlook (or, if I may be forgiven, inlook), technique, and personality, that Robinson's par¬ticular excellence lies; thus the tone is worth examining.
Robinson's mind was not sensuously rich, if by that is meant a Keatsian or Hopkinsian outgoingness into nature as a bodily experience and the trust and delight in nature that this attitude implies. His poetic interests are psychological and philosophical; he examines the splits between what is and what might nave been, what must be and what cannot be. That Robinson sees these differences to matter very little, finally, does not mean that they do not matter to the people who suffer from them; it is, in fact, in this realm of delusionary and obsessive suffering that Robinson's poems take place. Though his mind was not rich in a sensuous way, it was both powerful and hesitant, as though suspended between strong magnets. This gives his work an unparalleled sensitivity in balance; and from this balance, this desperately poised uncertainty, emanates a compassion both very personal and cosmic--a compassion that one might well see as a substitute for the compassion that God failed to supply. It is ironic at times, it is bitter and self-mocking, but it is always compassion unalloyed by sentimentality; it has been earned, as it is the burden of the poems themselves to show. This attitude, this tone, runs from gentle, rueful humor--though based, even so, on stark constants of human fate such as the aging process and death--to the most terrible hopelessness. It may appear in the tortuous working out of a long passage, or it may gleam forth for an instant in surroundings not seen until its appearance to be frightening, as in the poem below.
"Isaac and Archibald" is a New England pastoral in which a twelve-year-old boy takes a long walk with an old man, Isaac, to visit another old man at his farm. Nothing much happens, except that both Isaac and Archibald manage to reveal to the boy the signs of mental decline and approaching death in the other. The two men drink cider; the boy sits and reflects, prefiguring as he does the mature man and poet he will become. The boy's awareness of death is built up by small, affectionate touches, some of them so swift and light that they are almost sure to be passed over by the hurried reader.
Hardly had we turned in from the main road
When Archibald, with one hand on his back:
And the other clutching his huge-headed cane,
Carne limping down to meet us.--"Well! well! well!"
Said he; and then he looked at my red face,
All streaked with dust and sweat, and shook my hand,
And said it must have been a right smart walk
That we had had that day from Tilbury Town.--
"Magnificent," said Isaac; and he told
About the beautiful west wind there was
Which cooled and clarified the atmosphere.
"You must have made it with your legs, I guess,"
Said Archibald; and Isaac humored him
With one of those infrequent smiles of his
Which he kept in reserve, apparently,
For Archibald alone. "But why," said he,
"Should Providence have cider in the world
If not for such an afternoon as this?"
And Archibald, with a soft light in his eyes,
Replied that if he chose to go down cellar,
There he would find eight barrels--one of which
Was newly tapped, he said, and to his taste
An honor to the fruit. Isaac approved
Most heartily of that, and guided us
Forthwith, as if his venerable feet
Were measuring the turf in his own door-yard,
Straight to the open rollway. Down we went,
Out of the fiery sunshine to the gloom,
Grateful and half sepulchral, where we found
The barrels, like eight potent sentinels,
Close ranged along the wall. From one of them
A bright pine spile stuck out alluringly,
And on the black flat stone, just under it,
Glimmered a late-spilled proof that Archibald
Had spoken from unfeigned experience.
There was a fluted antique water-glass
Close by, and in it, prisoned, or at rest,
There was a cricket, of the soft brown sort
That feeds on darkness. Isaac turned him out,
And touched him with his thumb to make him jump ...
Until the introduction of the cricket and the few words that typify it, there is nothing startling in the passage, though it is quite good Robinson, with the judicious adverb "alluringly" attached to the protrusion of the pine spile and the lovely affectionate irony of Archibald's "unfeigned experience" with the cider. But the cricket, of the sort that feeds on darkness, changes the poem and brings it into the central Robinsonian orbit. Here, the insect is a more terrifying and mysterious creature--a better symbol for the context--than a maggot or dead louse would be, for it is normally a benign spirit of household and hearth. This simple way of referring to it, as though the supposition that it "feeds on darkness" were the most obvious and natural thing in the world to say about it, produces a haunting effect when encountered along with the gentle old farmers' proximity to death and the boy's budding awareness of it.
It may be inferred from the above passages that Robinson is not a writer of unremitting brilliance or a master of the more obvious technical virtuosities. He is, rather, as has been said, a poet of quick, tangential thrusts, of sallies and withdrawals, of fleeting hints and glimpsed implications. In his longer poems, particularly, the impacts build up slowly, and it is only to those who have not the sensitivity to catch the sudden, baffling, half-revealing gleams--those who are "annoyed by no such evil whim/As death, or time, or truth"--that Robinson's poems are heavy and dull. Though he has a way, particularly in the later poems, of burying his glints of meaning pretty deeply in the material that makes them possible, Robinson at his best manages to use the massiveness of discourse and the swift, elusive gleam of illumination--the momentary flashing into the open of a stark, tragic hint, a fleeting generalization--as complementaries. And when the balance between these elements is right, the effect is unforgettable.
At times it appears that Robinson not only did not seek to avoid dullness but courted it and actually used it as a device, setting up his major points by means of it and making them doubly effective by contrast, without in the least violating the unity of tone or the huge, heavy drift of the poem toward its conclusion. He is a slow and patient poet; taking his time to say a thing as he wishes to say it is one of his fundamental qualities. This has worked against him, particularly since his work has survived into an age of anything but slow and patient readers. The pedestrian movement of much of his work has made him unpopular in an era when the piling on of startling effects, the cramming of the poetic line with all the spoils it can carry, is regarded not so much as a criterion of good or superior verse of a certain kind, but as poetry itself, other kinds being relegated to inferior categories yet to be defined. Rut Robin¬son's considered, unhurried lines, as uncomplicated in syntax as they are difficult in thought, in reality are, by virtue of their enormous sincerity, conviction, and quiet originality, a constant rebuke to those who conceive of poetry as verbal legerdemain or as the "superior amusement" that the late T. S. Eliot would have had it be.
The Robinson line is simple in the way that straightforward English prose is simple; the declarative sentence is made to do most of the work. His questions, though comparatively rare, are weighted with the agony of concern, involvement, and uncertainty. It is the thought, rather than the expression of the thought, that makes some of Robinson difficult, for he was almost always at pains to write simply, and his skills were everywhere subservient to this ideal. My personal favorite of Robinson's effects is his extremely subtle use of the line as a means of changing the meaning of the sentence that forms the line, the whole poem changing direction slightly but unmistakably with each such shift
What is it in me that you like so much,
And love so little?
And yet for all his skill, Robinson's technical equipment is never obvious or obtrusive, as Hopkins', say, is. This is, of course, a tribute to his resourcefulness, for in his best pieces the manner of the poem is absorbed into its matter, and we focus not on the mode of saying but on the situatíons and characters into whose presence we have come.
IV
Robinson's favorite words, because they embody his favorite way of getting at any subject, are "may" and "might." The whole of the once-celebrated "The Man Against the Sky," for example, is built upon their use. When the poet sees a man climbing Mount Monadnock, it is, for the purposes of his poem, important that he not know who the man is or what he is doing there, so that the poem can string together a long series of conjectural possibilties as to who he might be, what might happen to him, and what he might conceivably represent.
Even he, who stood where I had found him,
On high with fire all round him,
Who moved along the molten west,
And over the round hill's crest
That seemed half ready with him to go down,
Flame-bitten and flame-cleft,
As if there were to be no last thing left
Of a nameless unimaginable town--
Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken
Down to the perils of a depth not known ...
When he reaches the words "may have," the reader is in true Robinson country; he lives among alternatives, possibilities, doubts, and delusionary gleams of hope. This particular poem, which not only uses this approach but virtually hounds it to death, is not successful mainly because Robinson insists on being overtly philosophical and, at the end, on committing himself to a final view. Another shortcoming is that he is not sufficiently close to the man, for his poems are much better when he knows something of the circumstances of a human life, tells what he knows, and then speculates, for the unresolved quality of his ratiocinations, coupled with the usually terrible facts, enables him to make powerful and haunting use of conjecture and of his typical "may have" or "might not have" presentations of alternative possibilities.
It is also true of this poem that it has very little of the leavening of Robinson's irony, and this lack is detrimental to it. This irony has been widely commented upon, but not, I think, quite as accurately as it might have been. Though it infrequently has the appearance of callousness or even cruelty, a closer examination, a more receptive feeling of its effect, will usually show that it is neither. It is, rather, a product of a detachment based on helplessness, on the saving grace of humor that is called into play because nothing practical can be done and because the spectator of tragedy must find some way in which to save himself emotionally from the effects of what he has witnessed.
No, no--forget your Cricket and your Ant,
For I shall never set my name to theirs
That now bespeak the very sons and heirs
Incarnate of Queen Gossip and Ring Cant.
The case of Leffingwell is mixed, I grant,
And futile seems the burden that he bears;
But are we sounding his forlorn affairs
Who brand him parasite and sycophant?
I tell you, Leffingwell was more than these;
And if he prove a rather sorry knight,
What quiverings in the distance of what light
May not have lured him with high promises,
And then gone down?--He may nave been deceived;
He may have lied--he did; and he believed.
The irony here is not based on showing in what ridiculous and humiliatíng ways the self-delusion of Leffingwell made of him a parasite and sycophant; it works through and past these things to the much larger proposition that such delusion is necessary to life; that, in fact, it is the condition that enables us to function at all. The manufacture and protection of the self-image is really the one constant, the one obsessive concern, of our existence. This idea was, of course, not new with Robinson, though it may be worth mentioning that many psychiatrists, among them Alfred Adler and Harry Stack Sullivan, place a primary emphasis on such interpretations of the human mentality. What should be noted is that the lies of Leffingwell and of Uncle Ananias are in their way truths, for they have in them that portion of the truth that comes not from fact but from the ideal.
All summer long we loved him for the same
Perennial inspiration of his lies
There is something more here, something more positive, than there is in the gloomy and one-dimensional use of similar themes in, say, Eugene O?Neill's The Iceman Cometh, for in Robinson's poems the necessity to lie (and, with luck, sublimely) is connected to the desire to remake the world by remaking that portion of it that is oneself. Robinson shows the relation between such lies and the realities they must struggle to stay alive among, and he shows them with the shrewdness and humor of a man who has told such lies to himself but sadly knows them for what they are. The reader is likely to smile at the absurdity--but also to be left with a new kind of admiration for certain human traits that he had theretofore believed pathetic or contemptible.
V
These, then, are Robinson's kinds of originality, of poetic value--all of them subtle and half-hidden, muffled and disturbing, answering little but asking those questions that are unpardonable, unforgettable, and necessary.
It is curious and wonderful that this scholarly, intelligent, child-like, tormented New England stoic, "always hungry for the nameless," always putting in the reader's mouth "some word that hurts your tongue," useless for anything but his art, protected by hardier friends all his life, but enormously courageous and utterly dedicated (he once told Chard Powers Smith at the very end of his life, "I could never have done anything but write poetry"), should have brought off what in its quiet, searching, laborious way is one of the most remarkable accomplishments of modern poetry. Far from indulging, as his detractors have maintained, in a kind of poetical know-nothingism, he actually brought to poetry a new kind of approach, making of a refusal to pronounce definitively on his subjects a virtue and of speculation upon possibilities an instrument that allows an unparalleled fullness to his presentations, as well as endowing them with some of the mysteriousness, futility, and proneness to multiple interpretation that incidents and lives possess in the actual world.
Robinson's best poetry is exactly that kind of communication that "tells the more the more it is not told." In creating a body of major poetry with devices usually thought to be unfruitful for the creative act--irresolution, abstraction, conjecture, a dry, nearly imageless mode of address that tends always toward the general without ever supplying the resolving judgment that we expect of generalization--Robinson has done what good poets have always done: by means of his "cumulative silences" as well as by his actual lines, he has forced us to reexamine and finally to redefine what poetry is--or our notion of it--and so has enabled poetry itself to include more, to be more, than it was before he wrote.
March, 1965 JAMES DICKEY