Alanson Schumann, Gardiner’s poète manqué. He fell in with a local literary club, and did his apprenticeship in versification there, indebted particularly to a Dr. At six Robinson was reciting “The Raven.” The local high school was rigorous, and he emerged with a little Latin, less Greek, and a serviceable background in the classics. Robinson’s hard-headed father had a soft spot for poetry, at least as a diversion, and the boy delighted him by memorizing passages out of William Cullen Bryant’s ample Library of Poetry and Song. In spite of the nominally rising fortunes of Gardiner, he did not absorb a narrative of optimism and material progress from his environment, in which he would have observed the cultural obsolescence of Puritanism and the decline of certain industries and methods, like ice harvesting on the river (which he worked at briefly) and water power. Robinson would throughout his life castigate himself for failure to hew to his models of middle class solidity, and he would never show a sense of entitlement. The family enjoyed limited upward mobility throughout the boys’ upbringings but never quite made it to the aristocracy (Edward became known as “The Duke of Puddledock”). Robinson’s mother Mary Palmer descended from an old New England family that counted Anne Bradstreet as an ancestor, but she had married the Scotch-Irish Edward Robinson, who began as a shipbuilder and then prospered in a variety of occupations and investments, notably timber speculation. The town was perhaps extraordinarily class-conscious, with a presiding “Big House” where the Gardiner family lived. Before Robinson turned one the family moved to Gardiner, an industrious and industrializing town of six thousand on the Kennebec River. The nation of Robinson’s youth was in a practical, moneymaking mood and inclined to ignore this kind of frivolity. What is a sonnet? ’Tis the tear that fell Here is Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century and self-styled “Squire of Poesy”: It is difficult to imagine how the poetry of the day could have been worse, any less accountable to anything outside of its conventions. In the two years after that Melville and Whitman died without followings. Emily Dickinson died when Robinson was in high school her 1890 Poems made a brief splash and then subsided. Housman and Thomas Hardy were older, but had similar career arcs: Housman’s first book of poems came out in 1896, the same year as Robinson’s (Housman’s was also self-published), and Hardy’s appeared in 1898. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Walter De La Mare, William Vaughan Moody, Edgar Lee Masters, Stephen Crane, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. A list of poets born within five years of him would include W. He hated “Edwin” for completing the egregious triple rhyme of his full name, and for resembling “Edward,” with which it was confused all the time, even in his second Pulitzer citation and hometown obituary. Robinson was born in 1869 in Head Tide, Maine, the third of three boys, his name having been picked out of a hat at a lawn party. For a man with no life, Robinson, Robinson the phenomenon, proves to be quite complicated. Donaldson has achieved a more complete reconstruction of the poet’s personal circumstances than has yet been possible, and in tactfully overlaying this reconstruction with criticism of the poems he arrives at a case study of a major artist that is fascinating far in excess of the facts. There is also the considerable inspiration of Robinson’s almost jarring wholesomeness as a man, which so far emerges more clearly the more material comes to light. The bulk of Robinson’s correspondence has recently been transcribed (no mean feat, given his handwriting), and two unpublished remembrances by the poet’s friends have recently surfaced. Robert Mezey, in the introduction to his 1999 selection of Robinson’s poems, despaired of explaining it: “No one yet has been able to give a wholly accurate account of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s life, or convey a persuasively vivid sense of the sort of man he was it may not be possible.” It has at some length proved possible, with a few factors working in Scott Donaldson’s favor. The gulf between the outward psychological intensity of the work and the inward silence of the writer (in accounts of the poet, every third word is “reticent”) has left a stubborn enigma. Already in this early sonnet he embraces a self-obliterating approach to literature, an approach he will seldom state this baldly but will never really alter. Robinson would not have liked to be written about. Let the man go: let the dead flesh be dead,Į. 553 pp., $34.95.Įdwin Arlington Robinson: Poems, selected and edited by Scott Donaldson. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life, by Scott Donaldson.
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