IX. Poets’ Corner
Greek Dignity and Yankee Ease
The single solid volume of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Collected Poems holds without crowding all but a few lines of the verse into which one of the acutest of Americans has distilled his observations and judgments during thirty studious, pondering, devoted, elevated years. Never once does Mr. Robinson show any signs of having withdrawn his attention from the life passing immediately under his eyes; but he has no more frittered away his powers in a trivial contemporaneousness than he has buried them under a recluse abstention from actualities: he has, rather, with his gaze always upon the facts before him, habitually seen through and behind them to the truths which give them significance and coherence. That he from the first chose deliberately to follow an individual—however solitary—path appears from a very early sonnet, Dear Friends:
The shame I win for singing is all mine,
The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours;
that he from the first deliberately chose the path of stubborn thought rather than of genial emotion appears from his unforgettable George Crabbe:
Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigour of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.
In the nineties, when England was yellow with its Oscar Wildes and Aubrey Beardsleys and America was pink-and-white with its Henry van Dykes and Hamilton Wright Mabies, Mr. Robinson was finding himself in the novels of Thomas Hardy—the sonnet on whom has been omitted from this collection—and fortifying himself in the study of Crabbe’s “hard, human pulse.” His absolute loyalty to the ideals of art and wisdom thus achieved is a thrilling thing.
The long delay of the fame to which he had every right may possibly be held in part to account for his countless variations upon the theme of vanity—even of futility, of which he is the laureate unsurpassed. Leaving to blither poets the pleasure of singing the achievements of the successful at the top of the wave, Mr. Robinson took for himself the task of studying the unarrived or the passé or the merely mediocre. Consider Bewick Finzer,
Familiar as an old mistake,
And futile as regret;
consider Miniver Cheevy, who wept that he was ever born because he could not stand the present and longed for the colours of romance—
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking;
consider the Poor Relation, who has perforce outstayed her welcome and on whom
The small intolerable drums
Of Time are like slow drops descending;
consider the women-maddened John Everldown, and Richard Cory committing suicide in the midst of what the world had thought triumphant prosperity, and Amaryllis shrunk and dead, and Aaron Stark so hard that pity makes him snicker, and Isaac and Archibald each telling their little friend that the other has grown senile, and the graceless, ancient vagabond Captain Craig discoursing gracefully from his death-bed like some trivial Socrates, and Leffingwell and Lingard and Clavering—
Who died because he couldn’t laugh—
and Calverly and that incomparably futile Tasker Norcross whose
tethered range
Was only a small desert,
and yet who knew that there was a whole world of beauty and meaning somewhere if he could only reach it—all these are the brothers and the victims of futility. Even when Mr. Robinson ascends to examine the successful he bears with him the sense of the vanity of human life. The peak of his poetry is that speech in which Shakespeare, in Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford, likens men to flies for brevity and unimportance:
Your fly will serve as well as anybody,
And what’s his hour? He flies, and flies, and flies,
And in his fly’s mind has a brave appearance;
And then your spider gets him in her net,
And eats him out and hangs him up to dry.
That’s Nature, the kind mother of us all.
And then your slattern housemaid swings her broom,
And where’s your spider? And that’s Nature, also.
It’s Nature, and it’s Nothing. It’s all Nothing.
It’s all a world where bugs and emperors
Go singularly back to the same dust,
Each in his time; and the old, ordered stars
That sang together, Ben, will sing the same
Old stave tomorrow.
And in his great flight into legend, in Merlin and Lancelot, Mr. Robinson elected to view a crumbling order from angles which seem opposite enough but which both exhibit Camelot as a city broken by frailties which on other occasions might be heroic virtues: Merlin follows love to Vivien’s garden at Broceliande and the kingdom of Arthur falls to ruin because it has no strong, wise man to uphold it; Lancelot leaves love behind him to follow the Light, like a strong, wise man, but the Light dupes him as much as love has duped Merlin, and ruin overtakes Camelot none the less. This is Mr. Robinson’s reading of existence: We are all doomed men and we hasten to our ends according to some whimsy which establishes our hours soon or late, leaving us, however, the consolation of being perhaps able to perceive our doom and perhaps even to understand it.
What is it that holds Mr. Robinson, with his profound grasp of the tragic, from the representation of those popular, magnificent hours of tragedy when—as a more pictorial critic might say—the volcano bursts from its hidden bed and the thunder reverberates along the mountains? Well, Mr. Robinson is a Yankee, free of thought but economical of speech; he is another Hawthorne, disciplined by a larger learning, a more rigorous intellect, and a stricter medium. The light of irony plays too insistently over all he writes to allow him to indulge in any Elizabethan splendours. His characters cannot rave. They, too, in a sort, are Yankees poet-lifted, and they must be at their most eloquent in their silences. Consequently the fates which this poet brings upon his quiet stage must all be understood and not merely felt. He gives the least possible help; he pitilessly demands that his dramatic episodes be listened to with something like the tenseness with which the protagonists undergo them and without alleviating commentary or beguiling chorus; he never ceases to cerebrate or allows his readers to. Such methods imply selected readers. They imply, too, on the poet’s part, that he pores too intently over the white core of life to look long or often at the more gorgeous surfaces. If Mr. Robinson has any strong passion for the outward pageantry of life—such as men like Scott or Dickens have—he does not communicate it. His rhythms throb with heightened thought not with quickened pulses, or only with pulses quickened by thought. No line or stanza escapes his steady, conscious, intelligent hands and runs off singing. Endowed at the outset with a subtle mind and a temperament of great integrity, he has kept both uncorrupted and unweakened and has hammered his lovely images always out of the purest metal and in the chastest designs.
To lay too much stress upon the tragic and the fateful in his work is to do it, however, less than justice. It contains hundreds of lines of the shrewdest wordly wisdom, of the most delicate insight into human character in its untortured modes, of rare beauty tangled in melodious language. He has employed the sonnet as a vehicle for dramatic portraiture until he has almost created a new type; he has evolved an octosyllabic eight-line stanza which is unmistakably, inalienably, inimitably his; he has achieved a blank verse which flawlessly fits his peculiar combination of Greek dignity and Yankee ease; he has, for all his taste for the severer measures, taught his verses, when he wanted, to lilt in a fashion that has put despair in many a lighter head. Nor must it be overlooked that Mr. Robinson has written some of the gayest verses of his generation, as witness these from the ever-memorable Uncle Ananias:
His words were magic and his heart was true,
And everywhere he wandered he was blessed.
Out of all ancient men my childhood knew
I choose him and I mark him for the best.
Of all authoritative liars, too,
I crown him loveliest.
How fondly I remember the delight
That always glorified him in the spring;
The joyous courage and the benedight
Profusion of his faith in everything!
He was a good old man, and it was right
That he should have his fling....
All summer long we loved him for the same
Perennial inspiration of his lies;
And when the russet wealth of autumn came,
There flew but fairer visions to our eyes—
Multiple, tropical, winged with a feathery flame,
Like birds of paradise....