A History of American Literature

346 Making It New: 1900–1945

way to be new.” Robinson’s first and last love was what he called “the music of English

verse.” As he explained to a friend, he was “a classicist in poetic composition” who

believed that “the accepted media for masters of the past” should “continue to be

used for the future.” However, he was far from being one of the “little sonnet-men”

as he contemptuously referred to them, mere imitators of English fashion and forms.

On the contrary, he was deliberately local: many of his poems are set in Tilbury

Town, a fictive place based on his boyhood home of Gardiner, Maine. And he was a

genuine original, obsessed with certain personal themes: human isolation, the

tormented introversions of the personality, the doubts and frustrations of lonely

people inhabiting a world from which God appears to have hidden His face. Few

poets have ever understood loneliness better than Robinson, perhaps because he

suffered from it severely himself. The early death of his mother, and then of his

father in ghastly circumstances, helped make life “a living hell” for him, Robinson

said, while he was young. In his adult years, Robinson was to enjoy considerable

success. His early work, published in such volumes as The Children of Night (1897),

earned him the support of Theodore Roosevelt. His 1910 collection, The Town Down

the River, was popular enough to allow him to devote himself to writing. His later

work, like The Man Against the Sky (1916), won him critical acclaim. His trilogy of

poems based on the Arthurian legend, published between 1917 and 1927, Merlin,

Lancelot, and Tristram, enjoyed a wide readership; and his Collected Poems (1921)

was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Yet he struggled against depression and alcoholism all

his life. And his perennial subject became what he termed “the slow tragedy of

haunted men” – those whose “eyes are lit with a young light,” illusions that at once

cripple and save them – and “The strange and unremembered light that is in dreams”

• the obsessive effort to make sense of experience when there is perhaps no sense to
  be made. “The world is not ‘a prison-house,’ ” Robinson insisted, “but a kind of
  spiritual kindergarten, where millions of infants are trying to spell ‘God’ with the
  wrong blocks.” Robinson saw himself and his poetic characters as notable members
  of that kindergarten: people whose minds and language, their “words,” can never
  quite encompass the truth about the universe, the “Word,” but who nevertheless
  keep on trying.
  The bleakness of Robinson’s vision, particularly in his early work, comes out in
  poems like “The House on the Hill” and “Richard Cory.” In “The House on the Hill”
  the bleakness issues from the sense that, now that the house in question is in “ruin
  and decay” and its inhabitants are departed, any comment seems a superfluous
  gesture. The opening lines announce this perception:

They are all gone away,

The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

To try to attach words to vacancy, to clothe transience and loneliness in language,

is a futile gesture, the poem suggests. More remarks are added to the opening ones,

but the constant repetition of the first three lines, in varying sequence, gives the

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