Louis Coxe
In the following essay, Coxe decries the neglect of
Edwin Arlington Robinson as a poet and identifies
strengths that he sees in the poet’s works.
To the contemporary reader it seems strange
that Allen Tare, in 1933, should have referred to
E. A. Robinson as the ‘‘most famous of living
poets’’ and again as the writer of ‘‘some of the finest
lyrics of modern times.’’ As far as most of us are
concerned, Robinson ekes out a survival in
‘‘anthological pickle,’’ as he called it, and few read-
ers try to go beyond, for if any poet has been
damned by the anthologists it is Robinson. Why
the decline in his reputation? Did critics puff him far
beyond his desserts? Can acritic today judge him on
the basis of the old chestnuts, ‘‘Miniver Cheevy,’’
‘‘Flammonde,’’ ‘‘Richard Cory’’? Should criticism
reiterate that he ruined himself writing those inter-
minable narratives and dismiss him as a ‘‘transition
figure’’ between somebody and somebody else,
both presumably more ‘‘important’’? Yvor Winters,
in his recent book, has gone far to disestablish the
transitional and place the essential Robinson; yet
neither he nor Tate has told why he considers the
poems he praises praiseworthy. In his brief study,
Winters has given an excellent analysis of Robin-
son’s failings and failures, but there is still the prob-
lem of the kind of excellence readers who come to
Robinson these days should expect. Vicissitudes of
temper and fashion apart, I think much of the
neglect of Robinson’s work has derived from the
deceptively old-fashioned appearance it presents
and from the very stern cosmology out of which
the poetry arises. The texture of the poetry is of a
sort we are not used to; the subject matter can be
misunderstood. Above all, Robinson’s technique
lends itself to abuse (and he abused it frequently)
so that often the reader may not detect that under
an apparently calm surface many forms are in
motion.
Robinson is a poet with a prose in view. Read
‘‘Eros Turannos’’ or ‘‘For a Dead Lady’’ or ‘‘The
Gift of God’’ and you will feel that the scope of a
long-naturalistic novel has emerged from a few
stanzas. Yet Tate, in his brief essay, says that Rob-
inson’s lyrics are ‘‘dramatic’’ and that T. S. Eliot
observes this to be a characteristic of the best mod-
ern verse. I really do not know what the word
dramaticmeans in this regard;Robinson’s poetry
is not dramatic in any sense of the word commonly
accepted, unless it be that Robinson, like James,
likes to unfold a scene. To look for anything like
drama in the poems is idle, in that the excitement
they convey is of a muted sort, akin to that which
James himself generates. This poet wears no
masks; he is simply at a distance from his poem,
unfolding the ‘‘plot,’’ letting us see and letting us
make what applications we will. This directness,
this prose element, in Robinson’s verse is easy
enough to find; less so to define or characterize.
One can say this, however, just as Pope was at his
best in a poetry that had morality and man in
society as its subject matter and its criterion, so
Robinson is happiest as a poet when he starts
with a specific human situation or relationship,
with a ‘‘story.’’ By the same token, he fails most
notably when he engages in philosophic specula-
tion, when he writes poems, such as the ‘‘Octaves,’’
or many of the sonnets, that have no real subject
matter, no focus of events or crisis seen objectively.
The parallel between his method and that of Pope
is patently incomplete, yet each poet, basing his
whole scheme on certain immutable moral convic-
tions and concerning himself primarily with man as
a social creature, strove for a poetry that would be
external, transparent, unified. Neither made elab-
orate experiments with form, but each was content
to exploit with dexterity a few common meters,
because for both Pope and Robinson the real busi-
ness was what was finally said and communicated.
Both used their individual idioms, each far
removed from anything we find today: spare
wherewearelush,generalwherewearespecific,
detailed where we are reticent or silent. The twen-
tieth century has learned to dislike abstractions as
the result of being badly cheated by them, yet the
fear should perhaps be of the susceptibility to
fraud, however pious.
Whatever Robinson’s weaknesses, his
frauds are few and those few easy to expose.
The best poems work toward a condition ofDESPITE THE ALMOST INSUPPORTABLE
DURESS OF ROBINSON’S ATTITUDE, WE CAN HARDLY
ACCUSE HIM OF CYNICISM OR HOPELESSNESS. IN
EVERY INSTANCE HIS VIEW OF PEOPLE IS WARM AND
UNDERSTANDING, NOT AS THE PATRONIZING SEER
BUT AS THE FELLOW SUFFERER.’’Miniver Cheevy