Thirty years ago, in "Modernism in American Literature," the first assignment was to read some of E. A. Robinson's Tillbury Town Portraits--"Richard Corey," "Cliff Klingenhagen," "Miniver Cheevy," "Eros Turannos," "Bewick Finzer," "Luke Havergal," "Mr. Flood's Party," maybe a few more that I've forgotten. (Many of Robinson's poems may be read here.) These are short lyrics, often rhymed, exploring the unrelievedly distressed inner lives of the inhabitants of Robinson's native Gardiner, Maine, renamed in his poetry Tillbury Town. My impression is that, except for "Richard Corey," referred to in a Simon and Garfunkel song, these poems have lapsed into obscurity, and that Robinson, who during his life benefitted from the patronage of President Theodore Roosevelt, has dropped off the Am Lit syllabus. The other poets studied in the course--Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Williams--now make Robinson look like the answer to a who-does-not-belong question.
But now comes the redoubtable Charles Simic to review, in the NYRB dated December 6, 2007, a new biography of Robinson, by Scott Donaldson, and a selection of his poems edited by Donaldson, who calls Robinson "a great American poet and an exceptionally fine human being." Simic concurs regarding Robinson's character and has many good things to say about a relatively small subset of his work--pretty much the same subset I was assigned to read thirty years ago. As Simic observes, social and psychological realism were by Robinson's day acceptable in fiction, but poetry was still ruled by a genteel tradition that required picturesque landscapes, love, and uplifting sentiments. About an early volume Robinson felt compelled to warn a friend not to expect much natural description. "There is very little tinkling water, and . . . not a red-bellied robin in the whole collection," he wrote. There is instead hypocrisy, cruelty, isolation, and despair. Marriage is loveless. The outwardly successful are suicidal. Some endure with Roman fortitude abetted by alcohol. The commentary on Robinson's poetry often mentions that he studied Emersonian transcendentalism at Harvard, but his poetry reminds me more of Thoreau, especially the dictum that most of us "lead lives of quiet desperation."
In an essay on Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," John Berryman noted that the poem begins with a nice rhyme--
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky,
--that seems pleasantly redolent of much other "dim, romantic verse." He then quotes the next line--
Like a patient etherized upon a table
--and declares, "With this line, modern poetry begins." But working within conventional forms, and employing rhyme and meter, Robinson, who was born nineteen years before Eliot, had already invented a new subject matter for American poetry. Simic quotes a contemporary reviewer who, taking the measure of Robinson's view of things, wrote in The Boston Globe: "Where was it written that this world was hell?" Robert Frost, another New Englander and occasional chronicler of underpublicized aspects of small-town American life, was born just five years after Robinson but did not begin publishing poetry until he was 40. Though he somehow has acquired a reputation as a poet of rural values and simplicity, the true subjects of Frost's poetry are (as Randall Jarrell argued in his essay on "the other Frost") the insignificance of man, the indifference of nature, God's absence, the frailty of life and health and sanity, the end of the world. Simic, by seconding Donaldson's emphasis on what was original and radical in Robinson's poetry, achieves a sort of after-the-fact justification for the details of my 1970s Am Lit syllabus. In important ways he does belong with such "standard authors" as Frost and Eliot.
The most enjoyable part of Simic's review, though, concerns Robinson's life and family background. The household of origin, including especially the fates of his two brothers, goes a long way toward explaining his attraction for eccentrics and "losers." Robinson himself was something of a vagabond, devoted to his work to the exclusion of all pecuniary considerations, but generous with family and friends when the sinecure secured by Roosevelt, or literary prizes won later in life, left him comparatively, temporarily flush. He had a fondness for drink but mostly stayed steadily at work, producing in his middle and later years a considerable body of poems that, in Simic's summary, are "unreadable," "long-winded," "incomprehensible," and "astonishingly boring." He had a special interest in reworking the Arthurian legends. He was embarrassed by his appearance--"I have a look that might lead one to think that I had just been eating the lining out of my own coffin"--and never married. He died in 1935, at age 65. Today is the 138th anniversary of his birth.
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