'The Queer, Odd Sticks of Men'

A friend suggests Louise Bogan may have had the title poem of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s The Man Against the Sky (1916) in mind when writing the journal entry I posted last week. It’s a long shot and there’s likely no way to prove it, but it gave me an excuse to read the poem again. Both Robinson and Bogan were born in Maine and were great practitioners of form, sufficiently confident to use it elastically, not as a straitjacket. The affinities between them are plain to see.

In “To See Robinson,” his remembrance of a meeting with the poet in 1929, Winfield Townley Scott writes: “He said of ‘The Man Against the Sky’ that ‘The whole ending of the poem is ironical, even sarcastic. Of course, the implication is that there is an existence [after death].’ And speaking of what so many critics had found to be a ‘philosophy of failure’ in his poetry, he said ‘I’ve always rather liked the queer, odd sticks of men, that’s all. The fat, sleek, successful alderman isn’t interesting.’” Here are the concluding lines of "The Man Against the Sky":

”If after all that we have lived and thought,       

All comes to Nought,—

If there be nothing after Now,      

And we be nothing anyhow,          

And we know that,—why live?      

’Twere sure but weaklings’ vain distress 

To suffer dungeons where so many doors

Will open on the cold eternal shores       

That look sheer down        

To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness        

Where all who know may drown.”

I sense Robinson is trying too hard. There’s a portentousness about the poem that I find off-putting. Unless your name is Isaiah, leave prophecy alone. This has never been among my favorite Robinson poems. I prefer those devoted to his “queer, odd sticks of men,” the poems that often read like condensed short stories, character sketches: “Reuben Bright,” “Mr. Flood’s Party” and “Isaac and Archibald,” among others. J.V. Cunningham in “Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Brief Biography” (The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham, 1976) writes:

“He lived during his mature life among the moderately wealthy and cultured and with the outcast and miscast. He belonged to the former by breeding, to the latter by experience, imagination, and compassion. And he wrote of both.”