A History of American Literature

348 Making It New: 1900–1945

manner of implication. In effect, the reader is often asked to conjecture, just as so

many of Robinson’s narrators conjecture about the lives of those who have gone or

those they hardly know except as inhabitants of the same town. The poem becomes

an act of commemoration, in which the speaker recalls and rehearses a life with the

discomforting sense that he can only offer some provisional notes toward

understanding it. “We cannot have them here with us,” admits the narrator of his

departed friends in “Calverly’s,” “/ To say where their light lives are gone.” He cannot

say what has happened to them, what their lives were and their fates are; and because

he cannot say – and because there is nothing and no way to find out – he cannot

know what his own fate is, or its meaning. He can only know that he himself once

spent time at an inn called “Calverly’s,” that the others were there and are now gone,

and that he will follow them in due course. He cannot say what this means or if, in

fact, it means anything.

In rehearsing the mute, inglorious lives of the inhabitants of Tilbury Town

Robinson was, he knew, rebelling against the orthodoxies of the pastoral tradition –

that body of writing, particularly strong in the United States, that locates happiness,

Edenic innocence and peace, in the rural world and village life. His sonnet addressed

to the English poet George Crabbe (“George Crabbe”) establishes his allegiances.

Like Crabbe, he implies, he is concerned with the loneliness of country people,

the austerity and sheer poverty of their existence; and he tries to write about these

things “In books that are as altars where we kneel / To consecrate the flicker, not the

flame.” The image measures the scope of Robinson’s ambitions and the way he

tries to place himself in terms of his Romantic predecessors. The flame is a tradi-

tional Romantic image for the transfiguring power of the imagination. Crabbe’s

work, and by implication his own, may not have this, Robinson admits, but traces

of that flame, one or two “flickers” of imaginative possibility, are discernible there

nevertheless. A character like Miniver Cheevy, in Robinson’s poem of that name,

illustrates the point; for, while Miniver might not be capable of transforming his

environment in the way a Romantic hero would be, he is not entirely determined by

it either. Miniver, we are told,

sighed for what was not

And dreamed, and rested from his labors

He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot

And Priam’s neighbors

Lines like these, combining irony with a touch of sympathetic melancholy, at first

invite us to see no resemblance between the dreamer and his dreams and then grad-

ually, through their very poignancy, qualify this, just a little, by hinting that a “flicker”

of the heroic impulse is to be found in a man like Miniver – even though it may be

too feeble ever to burst into “flame.” At worst, Miniver Cheevy is dimly aware of the

barrenness of his circumstances and finds refuge in what Robinson elsewhere calls

“the ... / Perennial inspiration of his lies”; at best, he can perhaps dream better

possibilities – his mind is actively engaged in a quest for meaning.

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