The roving critic

The single solid volume of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Collected Poems holds without crowding all but a few lines of the verse into which one of the acutest of Americans has distilled his observations and judgments during thirty studious, pondering, devoted, elevated years. Never once does Mr. Robinson show any signs of having withdrawn his attention from the life passing immediately under his eyes; but he has no more frittered away his powers in a trivial contemporaneousness than he has buried them under a recluse abstention from actualities: he has, rather, with his gaze always upon the facts before him, habitually seen through and behind them to the truths which give them significance and coherence. That he from the first chose deliberately to follow an individual—however solitary—path appears from a very early sonnet, Dear Friends:

that he from the first deliberately chose the path of stubborn thought rather than of genial emotion appears from his unforgettable George Crabbe:

In the nineties, when England was yellow with its Oscar Wildes and Aubrey Beardsleys and America was pink-and-white with its Henry van Dykes and Hamilton Wright Mabies, Mr. Robinson was finding himself in the novels of Thomas Hardy—the sonnet on whom has been omitted from this collection—and fortifying himself in the study of Crabbe’s “hard, human pulse.” His absolute loyalty to the ideals of art and wisdom thus achieved is a thrilling thing.

The long delay of the fame to which he had every right may possibly be held in part to account for his countless variations upon the theme of vanity—even of futility, of which he is the laureate unsurpassed. Leaving to blither poets the pleasure of singing the achievements of the successful at the top of the wave, Mr. Robinson took for himself the task of studying the unarrived or the passé or the merely mediocre. Consider Bewick Finzer,

consider Miniver Cheevy, who wept that he was ever born because he could not stand the present and longed for the colours of romance—

consider the Poor Relation, who has perforce outstayed her welcome and on whom

consider the women-maddened John Everldown, and Richard Cory committing suicide in the midst of what the world had thought triumphant prosperity, and Amaryllis shrunk and dead, and Aaron Stark so hard that pity makes him snicker, and Isaac and Archibald each telling their little friend that the other has grown senile, and the graceless, ancient vagabond Captain Craig discoursing gracefully from his death-bed like some trivial Socrates, and Leffingwell and Lingard and Clavering—

and Calverly and that incomparably futile Tasker Norcross whose

and yet who knew that there was a whole world of beauty and meaning somewhere if he could only reach it—all these are the brothers and the victims of futility. Even when Mr. Robinson ascends to examine the successful he bears with him the sense of the vanity of human life. The peak of his poetry is that speech in which Shakespeare, in Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford, likens men to flies for brevity and unimportance:

And in his great flight into legend, in Merlin and Lancelot, Mr. Robinson elected to view a crumbling order from angles which seem opposite enough but which both exhibit Camelot as a city broken by frailties which on other occasions might be heroic virtues: Merlin follows love to Vivien’s garden at Broceliande and the kingdom of Arthur falls to ruin because it has no strong, wise man to uphold it; Lancelot leaves love behind him to follow the Light, like a strong, wise man, but the Light dupes him as much as love has duped Merlin, and ruin overtakes Camelot none the less. This is Mr. Robinson’s reading of existence: We are all doomed men and we hasten to our ends according to some whimsy which establishes our hours soon or late, leaving us, however, the consolation of being perhaps able to perceive our doom and perhaps even to understand it.

What is it that holds Mr. Robinson, with his profound grasp of the tragic, from the representation of those popular, magnificent hours of tragedy when—as a more pictorial critic might say—the volcano bursts from its hidden bed and the thunder reverberates along the mountains? Well, Mr. Robinson is a Yankee, free of thought but economical of speech; he is another Hawthorne, disciplined by a larger learning, a more rigorous intellect, and a stricter medium. The light of irony plays too insistently over all he writes to allow him to indulge in any Elizabethan splendours. His characters cannot rave. They, too, in a sort, are Yankees poet-lifted, and they must be at their most eloquent in their silences. Consequently the fates which this poet brings upon his quiet stage must all be understood and not merely felt. He gives the least possible help; he pitilessly demands that his dramatic episodes be listened to with something like the tenseness with which the protagonists undergo them and without alleviating commentary or beguiling chorus; he never ceases to cerebrate or allows his readers to. Such methods imply selected readers. They imply, too, on the poet’s part, that he pores too intently over the white core of life to look long or often at the more gorgeous surfaces. If Mr. Robinson has any strong passion for the outward pageantry of life—such as men like Scott or Dickens have—he does not communicate it. His rhythms throb with heightened thought not with quickened pulses, or only with pulses quickened by thought. No line or stanza escapes his steady, conscious, intelligent hands and runs off singing. Endowed at the outset with a subtle mind and a temperament of great integrity, he has kept both uncorrupted and unweakened and has hammered his lovely images always out of the purest metal and in the chastest designs.

To lay too much stress upon the tragic and the fateful in his work is to do it, however, less than justice. It contains hundreds of lines of the shrewdest wordly wisdom, of the most delicate insight into human character in its untortured modes, of rare beauty tangled in melodious language. He has employed the sonnet as a vehicle for dramatic portraiture until he has almost created a new type; he has evolved an octosyllabic eight-line stanza which is unmistakably, inalienably, inimitably his; he has achieved a blank verse which flawlessly fits his peculiar combination of Greek dignity and Yankee ease; he has, for all his taste for the severer measures, taught his verses, when he wanted, to lilt in a fashion that has put despair in many a lighter head. Nor must it be overlooked that Mr. Robinson has written some of the gayest verses of his generation, as witness these from the ever-memorable Uncle Ananias:

THROUGH ELLIS ISLAND

Pascal D’Angelo was born, he says in an autobiographical sketch which he has let me see, “near the old walled city of Sulmona, Italy. It is a small town in the beautiful valley that was once the stronghold of the Samnites, walled in by the great blue barrens of Monte Majella. Few roads run to this quiet land and ancient traditions have never entirely died out there. Below the town is the garden of Ovid with its wild roses and cool springs, and above is an ancient castle that in summer is fantastically crowned with the mingling flight of pigeons which take care of their young on its towered heights. In the valley below are finely cultivated fields dotted with the ruins of Italica, the capital of fierce Samnium.” There Pascal D’Angelo went to school a very little during his childhood, handicapped by the fact that his parents at home could neither read nor write and that, because of their poverty, he was frequently obliged to stay at home to herd the family’s six or seven sheep and four goats. At sixteen he came with his father and a number of fellow-villagers to the United States.

“In this country immigrants from the same town stick together like a swarm of bees from the same hive and work where the foreman, or ‘boss,’ finds a job for the gang. At first I was water-boy and then shortly after I took my place beside my father. I always was, and am, a pick-and-shovel man.” Pascal D’Angelo worked here and there at similar rough labour, in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, West Virginia, Maryland—at first unable to read newspapers printed in English and unaware that there were any printed in Italian. But gradually he learned to read, and always he was a poet. “When night comes and we all quit work the thud of the pick and the jingling of the shovel are not heard any more. All my day’s labours are gone, for ever. But if I write a line of poetry my work is not lost, my line is still there—it can be read by you today and can be read by another tomorrow. But my pick-and-shovel works can be read neither by you today nor by another tomorrow.... So I yearn for an opportunity to see what I can accomplish ... before suffering, cold, wet, and rheumatism begin to harm me in the not distant future.”

One of the finest lyrics of his which I have seen thus gives a picture of the world in which he then moved:

As a result of being taken by a bar-tender to an Italian vaudeville show on the Bowery, the boy began to write—a farce, jokes, anecdotes “of the type for my class of people.” Then he bought a small Webster’s dictionary for a quarter and set out to master it. His companions laughed at him, but he persisted tirelessly. “I made them understand by spelling each word or writing it on a railroad tie or a piece of wood anywhere, just to express myself.” As his ardour and his reputation grew some young brakemen undertook to discipline him. “What they did was to bring new words every morning. They used to come half an hour before working time and ask me the meaning of the new words. If I could answer the first word all was well and good; then they were quiet all day. If not, when noon came all the office people, both men and women, crowded the place where everybody was present and tried to show me up. But their trials and efforts were all useless, as useless as I could make them. But one day they brought me before all the crowd, just to have me ridiculed perhaps, because they all were high-school lads. So they brought five words of which I knew only three. Then they began to proclaim themselves victorious. But I gave them two words they did not understand. Then I bet them I could give them ten words, and two more for good measure, that they could not understand. And I began: ‘troglodyte, sebaceous, wen, passerine, indeciduity, murine, bantling, ubiquity, clithrophobia, nadir’; and instead of two I added seven more to make their debacle more horrible. So I again wrote seven more words with the chalk which they provided me, writing them against the office façade where every one could see their eternal defeat: ‘anorexia, caballine, phlebotomy, coeval, arable, octoroon, risible.’ Then to complete I added ‘asininity’ and explained its meaning to them immediately.... After that triumph they named me ‘Solution’ and all became friends.”

Later he went to Sheepshead Bay to hear “Aïda” in the open air. “Suddenly when I heard the music I began to feel myself driven toward a goal—a goal that became more and more distinct each day. There were parts of such eloquent beauty in that opera that they tore my soul. At times, afterwards, even on the job amid the confusion of running engines, cars, screams, thuds, I felt the supreme charms of the melodies around me.” But he could not compose music, for he did not know one note from another—“as I still don’t know.... Music is not like the English language, that I began to write without a teacher.... In poetry I fared better. In the library I wandered upon Shelley and was again thrilled to the heart. Shelley I could proceed to emulate almost immediately.... It was a hard job to put my words in order. The stuff I used to write at first was unthinkable trash. But I was always bothering people to point out my mistakes. Grammar gave me plenty of trouble and still does. Rhyme stumped me. Then I began to read all kinds of poetry and saw that rhyme was not absolutely necessary. I also discovered that a good deal of what is called poetry is junk. So from the first I have tried to avoid echoing the things I have read, and to bring an originality both of expression and thought.”

Pascal D’Angelo has taught himself French and Spanish and has read most of the best poets of those tongues as well as of English and Italian. At present he is living under the most difficult conditions, asking no favours, and writing poetry which, though much of it is naturally full of imperfections, occasionally strikes such notes as these in The City:

TAP-ROOT OR MELTING-POT?

Recent American poetry is to recent British poetry somewhat as New York is to London. Its colours are higher and gayer and more diverse; its outlines are more jagged and more surprising; its surfaces glitter and flash as British poetical surfaces do not always do, though its substances are often not so solid or so downright as the British. Nowhere in America have we a poet of the deep integrity of Thomas Hardy, a poet so rooted in ancient soil, ancient manners, ancient dialect. Nor has England a poet shining from so many facets as Amy Lowell, or a poet resounding with such a clang of cymbals—now gold, now iron—as Vachel Lindsay. Experiment thrives better here than there; at least, our adventurers in verse, when they go out on novel quests for novel beauties, are less likely than the British to be held in by steadying tradition, and they bring back all sorts of gorgeous plunder considerably nearer in hue and texture to the flaming shop windows of Fifth Avenue than to those soberer ones of Bond and Regent streets. Even John Masefield, most brilliant living poet of his nation, runs true to British form, grounded in Chaucer and Crabbe, fragrant with England’s meadows, salt with England’s sea. Edgar Lee Masters, as accurately read in Illinois as Masefield in Gloucester, writes of Spoon River not in any manner or measure inherited with his speech, but more nearly in that of the Greek Anthology, by Masters sharpened with a bitter irony.

In all directions such borrowings extend. Even the popular verse men of the newspapers play daily pranks with Horace, fetching him from the cool shades of wit to the riotous companionship of Franklin P. Adams and George M. Cohan. China and Japan have been discovered again by Miss Lowell and Mr. Lindsay and Witter Bynner and Eunice Tietjens and a dozen others; have been discovered to be rich treasuries of exquisite images, costumes, gestures, moods, emotions. The corners of Europe have been ransacked by American poets as by American collectors, and translators at last are finding South America. Imagism has been imported and has taken kindly to our climates: H. D. is its finest spirit, Miss Lowell its firmest spokesman. Ezra Pound is a translator-general of poetic bibelots, who seems to know all tongues and who ransacks them without stint or limit. With exploration goes excavation. Poets are cross-examining the immigrants, as T. A. Daly the Italian-Americans. The myths and passions of Africa, hidden on this continent under three centuries of neglect and oppression, have emerged with a new accent in Mr. Lindsay, who does indeed see his Negroes too close to their original jungles but who finds in them poetry where earlier writers found only farce or sentiment. Still more remarkably, the Indian, his voice long drowned by the march of civilization, is heard again in tender and significant notes. Speaking so solely to his own tribe, and taking for granted that each hearer knows the lore of the tribe, the Indian must now be expanded, interpreted; and already Mary Austin and Alice Corbin and Constance Lindsay Skinner have worked charming patterns on an Indian ground. At the moment, so far as American poetry is concerned, Arizona and New Mexico are an authentic wonderland of the nation. Now poets and lovers of poetry and romance, as well as ethnologists, follow the news of the actual excavations in that quarter.

Indian and Negro materials, however, are in our poetry still hardly better than aspects of the exotic. No one who matters actually thinks that a national literature can be founded on such alien bases. Where, then, are our poets to find some such stout tap-root of memory and knowledge as Thomas Hardy follows deep down to the primal rock of England? The answer is that for the present we are not to find it. We possess no such commodity. Our literature for generations, perhaps centuries, will have to be symbolized by the melting-pot, not by the tap-root. Our geographical is also our spiritual destiny. The old idea of America-making in its absurd ignorance demanded that each wave of newcomers be straightway melted down into the national pot and that the resultant mass be as simply Anglo-Saxon as ever. This was bad chemistry. What has happened, and what is now happening more than ever, is that of a dozen—a hundred—nationalities thrown in, each lends a peculiar colour and quality. Arturo Giovannitti gives something that Robert Frost could not give; Carl Sandburg something not to be looked for from Edwin Arlington Robinson; James Oppenheim and Alter Brody what would not have come from Indiana or Kansas. Such a fusion of course takes a long time. The great myths and legends and histories of the Britons lay unworked for centuries in Anglo-Saxon England before the Normans saw them and built them into beauty. Eventually, unless the world changes in some way quite new to history, the fusion will be accomplished. But in the meantime experimentation and exploration and excavation must be kept up. We must convert our necessities into virtues; must, lacking the deep soil of memory, which is also prejudice and tradition, cultivate the thinner soil which may also be reason and cheerfulness. Our hope lies in diversity, in variety, in colours yet untried, in forms yet unsuspected. And back of all this search lie the many cultures, converging like immigrant ships toward the Narrows, with aspirations all to become American and yet with those things in their different constitutions which will enrich the ultimate substance.