C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Critical and Biographical Introduction by Walter Brooks Drayton Henderson (18871939)
By Edwin Arlington Robinson (18691935)
I
Mr. Robinson has published five volumes of poetry: ‘The Children of the Night’ (1897); ‘Captain Craig’ (1902); ‘The Town Down the River’ (1910); ‘The Man Against the Sky’ (1916); and ‘Merlin’ (1917); in addition two plays, ‘Van Zorn’ (1914) and ‘The Porcupine’ (1915).
His creed is love, announced at the start, demonstrated throughout, “Love’s the trade we’re plying,” as his first book has it:
His idea of the poet’s function was as early and as clearly expressed: “To get at the eternal strength of things, and fearlessly to make strong songs of it.” He also indicated just what was to be his peculiar way of doing this. Grief and loss, disease and desolation, being the “dreams of wasted excellence”; and every dream having in it “something that flouts deformity,” he would find “a constant opportunity” in all sorrow. It is, however, not the failure that attracts him;—there is no suspicion of morbidness in his work—but that feature of innermost and abiding things it aids him to perceive. Wounds and sore defeat may be here. But what he sees and presents is the battles of which they testify. Or was the battle listless: did Leffingwell, for instance,—to choose one from a vivid troop of his restored,—prove himself a sorry knight, then:
This measuring of men through the medium (reconstructed) of the fights they fled or bled in, removes Mr. Robinson’s work very far from the realm of the obvious. Its greatest effect is seldom immediate. This comes slowly, mysteriously; revealing through suggestion or innocent-seeming disclaimer, little by little, the face of truth.
So circumstanced, his style naturally has to maintain a classic restraint. It must be well balanced, urbane, human. All this it is, and withal has moods within its straight measure when it shows itself jovial, debonair, humorous, colloquial. Free it, too, for a moment from the necessities usually laid upon it, let the external circumstance need no more attention than the title gives it—then the poet is free to tell his whole story in overtones. Not prodigal of purely literary values—the poetic word or phrase—on these occasions it is as free of these as any other. Witness the irony of the lines on the ‘Veteran Sirens’ and the opulence of those on ‘The White Lights.’
This richness, humor, debonair carriage may seem odd qualities in the work of a poet so much given to study the spirit through failure. But in reality they are inevitable—considering the poet; and even derive much of their peculiar pungency from a sort of mitigated fatalism with which the nature of his study informs him. To say the least, he is not one who,