Edwin Arlington Robinson. 1930. The Granger Collection, New York.
FOR YEARS I’VE HELD to Ezra Pound’s insistence, “What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee/ What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage … ” These lines argued a sense of value I found securing to my mind and habits, making the familiar finally an unequivocal place where I might feel both legitimate and welcome. It would be impossible indeed to say that all worlds are in that way made or that we are not a far more complex persuasion of possibilities and tastes, proposing and reacting much as tides ceaselessly increase and ebb. But returning now to a poet and poetry I once must have taken as a benchmark for the art, I find myself, as it were, coming home.
Edwin Arlington Robinson, in fact, came from a town, Head Tide, Maine, where my mother and her sister, my aunt Bernice, used to help their blind grandfather manage the crossing of an often swift brook by means of the stepping stones. Just up on the hill from there is the surviving schoolhouse, still modest and determined in its white paint, and that is where my mother went first to school. I have a photo of her (and wonder who could have taken it) at ten with her lunch pail, backed against the great trunk of a pine tree, before she goes off to learn.
I have never been able to feel at home with Robert Frost, and one of my own memories of school days is the time I am asked to leave the room for mocking his “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It’s curious that I so distrusted a poet so skilled in his craft and so persuasive in his themes. Yet even his poem “Birches” was suspect to me, not because he didn’t know how such swinging of birches is accomplished but for the way he contests the located feeling with ironic homily, an unexpected smugness of ownership as if such lore could be only one’s own. In Maine there is a lovely way of avoiding resolution for another person’s choices, avoiding the opinion or advice that says simply, “This is the way to do it.” Those who have wondered at Robinson’s characteristic ambivalence in such a situation, or his persistent demur always, faced with such judgments, might well consider the way persons have long thought in Maine and also spoken.
In my own books surviving there is a mid-century Modern Library anthology edited by Conrad Aiken, which includes Robinson’s “The Man Against the Sky.” My sister and I were taught to be careful with books, not to mark in them or crease their pages, or to put them face down for fear of breaking their spines. Just so this book has painfully little to tell me now as to what excited my senses of poetry over fifty years ago. Very occasionally there is a modest check against a title (in pencil) and, even more rarely, an underscoring or line in the margin. As I recall, Hart Crane is given attention, and Marsden Hartley, and particularly Robinson and this one poem. I see that I was caught by the image, and the scale of its assertion, somehow more substantial in my thinking than the existential world I otherwise tried then to apprehend. I could find the same ground in Dostoyevsky and Lawrence, a personal, physical sense of things, which provoked even as it evaded all the usual meanings. Robinson’s rhetoric, his phrasing, pitch and cadence, had a particularity seeming to come from his own determination, a self-willed, self-taught character which moved me immensely. Of course, D. H. Lawrence had the same tone as did Hardy and Hart Crane. I deeply cared for those who had learned the hard way, so to speak, and for whom writing seemed a necessity against all odds.
The Second World War was a demanding time in which to come of age, and equally so its aftermath. It seemed we were all reading Sartre, Camus, leavened with Kafka and Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures. My own delight was also Valery’s Monsieur Teste— and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, an existential handbook if ever there was one. Then there was Céline, and again Dostoyevsky, whose Notes from Underground was first identified for me by Charles Olson.
The world was not very accommodating of “humanness,” albeit we seemed to overwhelm it just by our conduct and numbers. My schooling had begun with the Great Chain of Being firmly in place. Now it seemed humans ranked well below cockroaches and rats if literal survival were to be the measure. So, to that person I was, these lines concluding “The Man Against the Sky” seemed very apt and very true:
What have we seen beyond our sunset fires
That lights again the way by which we came?
Why pay we such a price, and one we give
So clamoringly, for each racked empty day
That leads one more last human hope away,
As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed eyes
Our children to an unseen sacrifice?
If after all that we have lived and thought,
All comes to Nought,—
If there be nothing after Now,
And we be nothing anyhow,
And we know that,—why live?
’Twere sure but weaklings’ vain distress
To suffer dungeons where so many doors
Will open on the cold eternal shores
That look sheer down
To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness
Where all who know may drown.
A poem of Malcolm Lowry’s begins something like, “As the dead end of each drear day draws near … ” There are also Samuel Beckett’s magnificently pessimistic poems. But no one can manage such a curiously vulnerable and shopworn rhetoric as does Robinson and make such ungainsayable sense, all in the determination, it would seem, of a confident depression—but that is not the right word? He is absolutely a writer, and it is the one thing he never yields, despite the circumstances into which, as “Miniver Cheevy,” he has been born—the death of his mother, the general despair, it would seem, of the whole family, the insistent pain of his damaged ear, the addicted brother, failing economics, desultory education, the isolation he experiences, somewhat as Marsden Hartley, whether in New York or Boston, or in Maine. The most happy circumstance appears to be his stays at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, to which he returns year after year as to a homestead.
Robinson is five years older than Frost, born the same year as Edgar Lee Masters (1869), and four years younger than Yeats. Hardy is twenty-nine years older although the two are often thought of together. It’s Robinson who writes Frost in 1917, “In ‘Snow,’ ‘In the Home Stretch,’ ‘Birches,’ ‘The Hill Wife,’ and ‘The Road Not Taken’ you seem undoubtedly to have added something permanent to the world … ” His own success in the twenties is marked by the publication of Tristram (1927), together with the honors variously given him a few years before. His great popularity and the Pulitzer Prize awarded his collected poems (1921) would seem to argue a secure authority. But after his death in 1935 Frost increasingly occupies the situation of the “New England” poet, and Robinson, unfashionable by my generation and presumed as an echo of the late nineteenth century at best, expectably fades from view.
Yet his circumstances were so curious. What other American poet can one think of whose work is reviewed by an American president, who then sees to it that he, the poet, is comfortably employed? Here is Yvor Winters’s summary:
In 1905 Theodore Roosevelt became interested in Robinson’s work, which had been called to his attention by his son, Kermit, then a pupil at Groton. Roosevelt, after trying to persuade Robinson to accept several positions, succeeded in getting him a place as special agent of the Treasury at $2,000 per year. Roosevelt invited Robinson to the White House and talked with him at length; he later wrote an article in praise of Robinson’s poems, for the Outlook and persuaded Scribner’s to reissue The Children of the Night. For his temerity in writing a critical article, the president was generally abused by the literary experts of the period, and Robinson’s poetry was belittled by them; but Roosevelt must have accomplished more toward assisting Robinson at this juncture with regard both to his reputation and to his personal life than anyone else had done. It is curious to note that Roosevelt found “Luke Havergal” and “Two Gardens in Linndale” obscure, although fortunately for Robinson he shared with the critics of a later generation a liking for poetry which he could not understand.
—Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1946
Winters’s interest is much to the point. His own adamant standards, both as poet and critic, were the terror of his time, and I well recall how he assayed to cut William Carlos Williams down to size and with confident judgment dismissed Hart Crane’s last poem “The Broken Tower” as ill done. His discussion of Robinson, written for New Directions’ The Makers of Modern Literature series, is compact and provocative, and it is certainly forthright (“ … but as I have already said, he devoted himself mainly to long poems, for which even in the years of his greatest achievement he had shown a marked incapacity, and he wrote too much and apparently published all that he wrote”).
Edwin Arlington Robinson. 1930. The Granger Collection, New York.
It is hard to argue with him now. What Winters proposes as Robinson’s virtues states my own sense of them very clearly: “the plain style, the rational statement, the psychological insight, the subdued irony, the high seriousness and the stubborn persistence.” Fifty years later these qualities are even more emphasized, and a poem which Winters speaks of as “one of the greatest short poems in the language” still intrigues me with its confusing mastery of a nearly frivolous form and rhythmic pattern, together with a pace and rhyming of such absolute and intimate integrity it cannot ever be abstracted or forgotten.
She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him …
—from “Eros Turannos”
But I cannot spoil the haunting story. The ending is just that, neither an explanation nor a conclusion—simply there. I find myself again crying, face wet with tears. Is it Maine I am talking about, or that he’s talking about, or a common sound, or feeling, or a way these words echo now in mind, or just that it is, life is, like this, an endless ambivalence one will never do more than recognize, at best, far too late? I heard this all so very long ago, and he was the one who told me.
… Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.
—Ibid.
OLD POEMS
One wishes the herd still wound its way
to mark the end of the departing day
or that the road were a ribbon of moonlight
tossed between something cloudy (?) or that the night
were still something to be walked in like a lake
or that even a bleak stair down which the blind
were driven might still prove someone’s fate—
and pain and love as always still unkind.
My shedding body, skin soft as a much worn
leather glove, head empty as an emptied winter pond,
collapsing arms, hands looking like stubble, rubble,
outside still those barns of my various childhood,
the people I still hold to, mother, my grandfather
grandmother, my sister, the frames of necessary love,
the ones defined me, told me who I was or what I am
and must now learn to let go of, give entirely away
There cannot be less of me than there was,
not less of things I’d thought to save, or forgot,
placed in something I lost, or ran after,
saw disappear down a road itself is no longer there.
Pump on, old heart. Stay put, vainglorious blood,
red as the something something.
“Evening comes and comes … ” What
was that great poem about the man against
the sky just at the top of the hill
with the last of the vivid sun still behind him
and one couldn’t tell
whether he now went up or down?