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Summary: "There was more than sound. . . more than just an axe."
Review: Like fellow New England poet Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson helped limber up traditional, rhymed American verse, steering it away from the stilted and bombastic norms of the 19th century while also avoiding free verse. More importantly, Robinson wrote about "the other half" -- drunks, dreamers, women-chasers, narcissistic suicides, jettisoned lover-boys, devastated widows, brutal misers. By doing so, he paved the way for the modernist obsesssion with the "common man". (In fact, he is still best known for his biting characterizations of Luke Havergal, Richard Cory, and Cliff Klingenhagen). A tense but satirical electricity runs through all of his work. As Frost said, "Robinson's theme was unhappiness itself, but his skill was as happy as it was playful... His life was a revel in the felicities of language."The earlier poetry is predominately concerned with failure and misery, "the withered souls of men", as Robinson put it. (Robinson wrote much this poetry while working as a ticket collector on the New York subway, not long out of Harvard). Men have paid a price for their innocence and are unable, like Zola (whom he praises in a poem) to look squarely at the "compromising chart of hell" they have created. Great democratic mobs judge each others' grief, a grief they can seldom comprehend. Writers worship "the flicker and not the flame". Misery and the passing of things toll like a villanelle in most of Robinson's early work: "There is ruin and decay," "long centuries have come and gone," the world seems to be churning toward the "western gate" of darkness, death's portal. By contrast, the more mature Robinson is more interested in light and voices and spiritual illumination. He sees great value in our intellectual and spiritual struggles, our so-called "modern" ideas, even though they may be "some day be quaint as any [tale] told / In almagest or chronicle of old." The older Robinson does not fight against the ultimately unknowable realities. He is not a disjointed Romantic raging against the misnamed "encroachments" of time. He is glad that reality remains a mystery in the end, a great and indecipherable code of silent stars and sheaves of girl-like, golden wheat that speak love in their very silence. The world, like true poetry, has "a mighty meaning of a kind / That tells the more the more it is not told." I bought this book several years ago in Malta during a bout of homesickness and it has been blowing my mind ever since. Check it out!
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