'Names Beautiful as Homer's Epithets'

I’m reading Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Collected Poems (1929) again. He often trespasses on the novelist’s preserve, writing poems with plots and distinct characters, and that’s one of the reasons I return so often to his work. The 1,018-page volume is not mine but the university library’s. I ought to order one for myself but the borrowed copy comes with an ad hoc supplement. The front flyleaf is inscribed “Katharine Keats Braithwaite, Christmas 1929.” A little digging reveals she was born in Boston in 1908, and her father, William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite (1878-1962), was an African-American poet and teacher. I put The William Stanley Braithwaite Reader on hold and will pick it up later today. I suspect there’s a bigger story here.

Pasted on the front pages are four newspaper clips, brown and brittle but legible, that report Robinson’s death on April 6, 1935. Judging from fragments of stories and ads on the backs of the clips, they were cut from a Boston newspaper, probably the Herald. The main story, accompanied by a mug shot of Robinson, carries three headlines in a one-column format:

“EDWIN ROBINSON,

POET, DIES AT 65”

“Maine Native Thrice Won

Pulitzer Prize for

His Writing”

“FIRST WON FAME

AS N.Y. LABORER”

I’ve never seen “thrice” in a headline, though it’s ideal for use in a single column. And here’s the lead of the Associated Press story: “The living ranks of the great moderns of American poetry and literature, who achieved classic fame with the turn of the century, dwindled further today with the death of Edwin Arlington Robinson.” Eighty-four years later I’m touched by Katharine Braithwaite’s devotion to Robinson. She turns her book into a sort of portable reliquary. I have no idea how the book ended up in the Fondren Library collection. I love reading books with traces of thoughtful previous readers. They establish a sense of continuity with the past and of solidarity with the serious readers who preceded us. Robert Richman in “To Some of My Books' Former Owners” (Daughters of the Alphabet, 2003) honors them:

“Tracers of each chapter’s ebb and flow,

did you devote your hours of rain to reading,

or was it brisk, essential exercise?

You lost yourselves in all those printed sighs.

“Natasha Drummond and Gustavus Jones!

(Names beautiful as Homer’s epithets.)

Boarders in the land of death: what's new?

Above me hangs a puzzling, empty blue.”