The case of E. A. Robinson

I’ve always found it interesting how some authors and thinkers—whether they be poets, novelists, philosophers, historians, or what have you—fade away into obscurity, despite being well known in their lifetimes, while others are salvaged from obscurity and become more influential over time. There are so many examples of this it hardly seems necessary to illustrate the point. The tastes and whims of our future readers are forever conditional. On one hand their tastes are apt to derive from our own; they will no doubt begin with the literary and intellectual inheritance we pass on to them, as well as the values inherent in our judgments. But they will also form, like all generations, new tastes and judgments in reaction to the events and times through which they live.

Last week over at E-Verse Radio’s blog, Ernie Hilbert alluded to two writers whose reputations have fallen into disrepair, novelist James Branch Cabell and poet Edwin Arlington Robinson. As I am only familiar with the latter, I cannot speak to Cabell’s case, but as to Robinson, it is clear that he wrote in a manner and style that was soon to be washed away by the swelling tide of Modernism. When viewed from the heights of Modernism, the little village of Robinson’s verse appears quaint and perhaps a touch rustic. It seems hopelessly out of touch in a world of skyscrapers, motor cars, and airplanes, and as we all know—or should know—Modernism was as much about the life rhythms of technological change as anything else. Simply put, day-to-day life changed radically between 1880 and 1930, beyond which everything old seemed very old. Robinson was old.

But was he any good? Of course, most of us know a few Robinson poems, most likely learned in high school, such as “Richard Cory” or “Mr. Flood’s Party”, and to be sure, “Richard Cory” is a very competent poem. I quote it in full below:

Whenever Richard Cory went to town,
We people on the pavement looked at him;
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
‘Good Morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Robinson excelled with these little portraitures of small-town people, and, here, his verse was perfectly adapted to these subjects in its plain and somewhat predictable patterns. The verses above are rather like a very professional piano-bar player who can more or less play all the songs, but is not particularly memorable. Robinson’s rhymes and meters are competent, rarely striking a false note and rarely registering a surprise, pleasant or otherwise. Such humdrum verse makes a poem like “Richard Cory,” for you are almost lulled into a sense of predictable close when the last line upsets an otherwise somnambulant effort.

But Robinson was capable of more and was in fact an exceedingly meticulous poet. He might write a few forgettable sonnets, and then impress with his handling of somewhat more difficult forms. For instance, from roughly the same period as “Richard Cory,” here is a fine villanelle composed of three-beat lines:

“The House on the Hill”

They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.

Robinson suffered, and suffers still, from being second-best (or third-, fourth-?) among those who practice similar effects in poetry. For sparkling plain-speech American idioms and treatment of the common man, one prefers Frost; for perfectly rendered monologues Browning is the better poet; for adapting formal designs in an age of free verse, one might look to Bishop instead. No, Robinson is not a poet of superlatives, neither in formal design or poetic sensibility. At his best, he was always a slight remove or two from sentimental rubbish, but his work does display more genuine poetic talent than most folks writing today, and his poetry deserves a better fate than being the exclusive preserve of high-school English teachers and their students.