literature. Authors tried to mirror in their works
what life was really like for ordinary people. Deter-
ministic and pessimistic, these works depicted a
world where individuals were shaped by forces
beyond their control, by accident, by chance, by
the factors of birth and class. Bleak urban settings
were depicted in which individuals struggled in
painful, isolated, and discouraging lives.
As the twentieth century dawned, a growing
discontent with these approaches gave way to the
modernist movement. In 1912, Harriet Monroe
founded Poetry, an influential magazine that
served to define the pre-World War I American
poetic vision.Poetryintroduced works by Ezra
Pound, Carl Sandburg, Hilda Doolittle, and
Vachel Lindsay, among others, who focused on
real life subjects presented directly. In England,
the imagist movement began, with its goal of cre-
ating unsentimental poetry that depicted the image
for its own sake, free of moralizing or philosoph-
ical intent.
The work of Edwin Arlington Robinson is
oftenseenaspoisedbetweentheoldstyles,withits
echoes of the Victorian and its dark look at roman-
tic ideals, and the experimental modernist poetry
that became increasingly common after 1912.
Social Change
When ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ was published, the coun-
try was in the middle of a cultural shift. The last
decades of the nineteenthcentury were called the
‘‘Gilded Age,’’ a phrase coined by Mark Twain,
because those years were characterized by finan-
cial extravagance among the upper class. Business
used coercive methods to shut out competition,
creating monopolies in fields of such valued and
necessary goods as food, petroleum, and trans-
portation (mainly trains). Poverty, meanwhile,
was widespread; immigration and the shift in pop-
ulation from farms to cities provided workers for
quickly developing mills and factories, creating
squalor and widespread disease in overcrowded
urban centers. The disparity between the rich
and the poor in the United States widened sharply
as the twentieth century began.
There was a clear shift in public sentiment.
The unionization movement arose at the end of
the nineteenth century, drawing attention to the
condition of workers. The troubles of labor was
spotlighted with the 1906 publication of Upton
Sinclair’s novelThe Jungle, which brought atten-
tion to the plight of employees in the meat packing
industry. New regulations were passed in the wake
of the Sinclair book that led to the Food and Drug
Administration guidelines, designed to ensure the
safety of food products. Anti-trust laws limited
monopolies even before the turn of the century.
Theodore Roosevelt, who made a national repu-
tation for himself by fighting corruption in
business, became president of the United States
in 1901 when President William McKinley was
assassinated. After decades in which workers
were ignored and left at the mercy of economic
pressures, the legitimate discontent of industrial
workers was finally brought to public attention.Critical Overview.
Though he struggled at the start of his career,
Edwin Arlington Robinson rose to national atten-
tion after President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a
review of Robinson’s second poetry collection,
The Children of the Night, in 1905. Not long afterAn ancient Greek helmet(Image copyright janprchal, 2009.
Used under license from Shutterstock.com)Miniver Cheevy