She crowns him with her gratefulness,
And says again that life is good;
And should the gift of God be less
In him than in her motherhood,
His fame, though vague, will not be small,
As upward through her dream he fares,
Half clouded with a crimson fall
Of roses thrown on marble stairs.
The recapitulation, the tying together, of the
symbolic and thematic materials serves in this, the
last stanza, a narrative as well as an expressive
purpose. The tone is epigrammatic rather than pro-
saic and must shift delicately, come to the edge of
banality, then turn off and finally achieve a muted
sublimity that runs every risk of sentimentality and
rhetoric yet never falters. The verse requires of us
what it requires of itself: a toughness that can
encompass the trite and mawkish without on the
one hand turning sentimental itself or on the other
resorting to an easy irony. The technique is the
opposite of dramatic in that Robinson leaves as
much to the reader as he possibly can; he uses no
persona; the conflict is given not so much as con-
flict-in-action before our eyes as it unfolds itself at
once, passes through complications, and returns to
the starting point, the same yet altered and, to some
degree, understood. To this extent Robinson is
ratiocinative rather than dramatic. What we and
the characters themselves think about the ‘‘plot’’ is
as important as the plot, becomes indeed the full
meaning of the plot.
Observably this ratiocinative and narrative
strain tends toward a kind of self-parody or for-
mula. Robinson resorted to trickery too often in
default of a really felt subject matter, as in ‘‘The
Whip.’’ Yet we must not feel that between the
excellence of such poems as ‘‘For a Dead Lady’’
and the dullness ofKings Jasperthere lies only a
horde of mediocre peoms; on the contrary, there is
no American poet who has approached Robinson
in the number of finished poems of high merit.
Winters’s list seems to me an excellent one, though
it may seem overly strict to some. In any case, it
clearly indicates that Robinson isthemajor Amer-
ican poet of our era, with only T. S. Eliot as a peer.
Of possible rivals, there is none whose claim rests
on the number offinishedpoems nor on wholly
achieved effects nor on the range and viability of
subject. Of coarse, this is a controversial statement
in many quarters, and odious comparisons are far
from the purpose; nevertheless, until such time as
serious readers of serious poetry make an attempt
to read and evaluate Robinson’s poetry, they must
take somebody else’s word for it. The poetry is
there—a fat volume with all the arid narratives at
the end for convenience, the better poems scat-
tered throughout. It may be that the time has
come for readers of poetry to place Robinson
where he belongs, or to read him at any rate. I
have attempted to reveal some of the more striking
virtues of the poetry and to dispel some miscon-
ceptions, and while I suppose there are readers
who do not like Robinson’skind of poetry, I
have tried to show what we must not look for in
it. It is to me important to get beyond fashion if we
can and take stock of our best writers, not being
deterred by what we have been trained to think
about them nor discouraged by faults that loom
largetousbecausetheyarenotourown.Ifwecan
understand if not believe in his external irony, his
cosmology, then we shall be equipped to recognize
his worth in the same way that we recognize that
of Swift, for example, or Mauriac. Time and fash-
ion will have their effects, true enough, but unless
we can rise above the predilections of the moment
in our reading, there is little possibility of our
understanding what we read.
Source:Louis Coxe, ‘‘Edwin Arlington Robinson: The
Lost Tradition,’’ inEnabling Acts: Selected Essays in
Criticism, University of Missouri Press, 1976, pp. 7–26.Sources
Anderson, Wallace L., ‘‘The Poetic Context,’’ inEdwin
Arlington Robinson: A Critical Introduction, Houghton
Mifflin, 1967, pp. 1–20.
Donoghue, Denis, ‘‘A Poet of Continuing Relevance,’’ in
Edwin Arlington Robinson, edited by Harold Bloom, Chel-
sea House, 1988, p. 29, originally published inConnoisseurs
of Chaos, Columbia University Press, 1984.
Lucas, John, ‘‘The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson,’’
inEdwin Arlington Robinson, edited by Harold Bloom,
Chelsea House, 1988, p. 137, originally published inMod-
erns and Contemporaries, Barnes & Noble Books, 1985.
Robinson, Edwin Arlington, ‘‘Miniver Cheevy,’’ inThe
Concise Columbia Book of Poetry, Columbia University
Press, 1990, pp. 140–41.
Sapir, Edward, ‘‘Poems of Experience,’’ inFreeman, Vol.
5, April 19, 1922, pp. 141-42, quoted in W. R. Robinson,
Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poetry of the Act, Press of
Western Reserve University, 1967, p. 1.
Winters, Yvor, ‘‘The Shorter Poems,’’ inEdwin Arlington
Robinson: A Collection of Critical Essays,editedbyFran-
cis Murphy, Prentice-Hall, 1970, p. 57, originally pub-
lished inEdwin Arlington Robinson, New Directions, 1946.Miniver Cheevy