total communication by means of suggestion
andstatement,withnoregardforthepoetas
speaker; that is, the attitudes out of which the
poems emerge we take as our own, and there is
no need to ascertain those of the speaker, since
Robinson is everywherethe same. His irony is
not ‘‘in’’ the poem but external, one constituent
of a cosmology that sees the human condition
as comic in the largest sense—sees life as a
desperate business butessentially, immutably
unalterable. This is not childish disillusion-
ment; it works out in the poetry as a cosmology
that seems to us, scions of the liberal-romantic
stock, bitter, profitless, perhaps old-fashioned.
And because Robinson so early in his career found
and grasped his ultimate beliefs, the modern reader
does not find what he must naturally look for:
progress, novelty, enlightenment. This poetry
does not intend certain things, and discussion of
the kind of verse Robinson wrote may clear the
ground and allow the reader to go to the poetry
with some idea of what not to expect or look for.
Many critics have spent too much time saying
that Robinson was obsessed with failure, thereby
accounting for his lapse into the profitless slough
of the long narratives. Yet none has shown how
vital a force the failure is as theme, how it contains
within itself a possibility of vision and maturity as
well as of pathos. To Robinson life and humanity
were failures inasmuch as they consistently fall
short of, not the ideal, but their own proper
natures. Robinson was never so romantically dis-
illusioned that he could be for long disturbed over
the discrepancy between actual and ideal, illusion
and reality; for him the real irony, the comedy, lay
in man’s willful misconception of life and his role
in it. The very willfulness may have a magnificence
of its own, as in ‘‘The Gift of God,’’ and the people
in his poems who come through to an awareness of
the true proportion do not simply rest there in
smug knowledge, but rather for the first time see
that it is from such vision of things as they are that
amanstarts:
He may by contemplation learn
A little more than what he knew,
And even see great oaks return
To acorns out of which they grew.
What may be irony from one point of view may
be comedy or pathos, perhaps a kind of muted
tragedy, from another. At all events, the point of
view is essentially the same, with only a pace back,
forward, or to one side that gives the particular
vision its specific color and shape.
The attitudes which have dominated the writ-
ing of our century have been rather different from
Robinson’s. We seem for the most part willing to
contemplate life as a tragic affair, to command the
ironic tone in our writing in order to express suc-
cessfully the tragic division we see gaping between
what we are and what we would be. Yet one
wonders at times if we actually dobelievethis or
whether it is another kind of myth-making, a
device for getting poetry written and read, like
Yeats’s visions. If we really do believe, then we
must accept the consequences of our faith; for in a
world that is ultimately tragic, happiness is irrele-
vant, despair the resort of the thin-skinned, and
total acceptance the only modus vivendi. The
acceptance itself must entail a kind of transubstan-
tiation; the Aristotelian essence of life turns to
something else while the ‘‘accidents’’ of evil and
death remain. This is the realm of miracle, and the
poetry of Robinson has nothing to do with it, for
his work merely tries to come to a naked vision of
the human condition without lusting after schemes
of revision, without trying to discover something
that is not and can not in nature be there. In
‘‘Veteran Sirens’’ all the terrible irony of man-
kind’s willful refusal to face facts emerges in the
pitying portrait of superannuated whores:
The burning hope, the worn expectancy,
The martyred humor and the maimed allure,
Cry out for time to end his levity,
And age to soften his investiture.
And we are all life’s whores. What strikes
Robinson as ironic is not the old discrepancy
between illusion and reality, not the wastage of
time, but the supreme dissipation of the expense
of spirit in a waste of shame, folly, and deceit. The
stern, still-Calvinist view of carnal sin here has
become a trope for life, for the way we all bargain
with life for a living and are finally cheated.
The best of Robinson’s poems have to do
with such plots, such expense of the soul’s life,
and usually have as their center the single, crucial
failure of a man or woman to commit that
destruction of the beloved self, to make that com-
plete disavowal of a precious image which alone
and finally leaves the individual free. The price of
such freedom comes high, ‘‘costing not less than
everything,’’ and is paid for by a crucial failure in
which the image referred to is destroyed, in many
such cases along with the life itself. InAmaranth,
for instance, Atlas and Miss Watchman, both
self-deluding artists, are destroyed along with
their work; although Fargo, who sees the truth,Miniver Cheevy