'To Be Reviled and Then Revered'

Were my library limited to a single volume by an American poet, I might choose Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Collected Poems. It’s merely honest to admit that Robinson wrote some mediocre verses, especially later in life when he was cranking out long (and popular) Arthurian sagas. Like Tennyson, he wrote too much. But his short poems from the first decades of the twentieth century are unmatched. This has to do, in part, with Robinson’s fondness for narrative. I like poems that tell stories, and some of his are in a league with Kipling’s short fiction. If Robinson writes in the first person, it’s in the voice of a character. No revelations of the poet's sensitivity. Read “Isaac and Archibald” and tell me it’s not subtler and more compelling than most of the short stories you’ve read lately. In an 1894 letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith (Untriangulated Stars: Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson to Harry de Forest Smith 1890-1905, 1947), Robinson writes:

 

“There is more in every person’s soul than we think. Even the happy mortals we term ordinary or commonplace act their own mental tragedies and live a far deeper and wider life than we are inclined to believe in the light of our prejudices.”

 

I reread one of Robinson’s lesser efforts, “The Master,” first collected in The Town Down the River (1910). When the late Robert Mezey edited The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (1999) for the Modern Library, he didn’t include it. Mezey’s selection is excellent and his introduction is the place to start for readers unfamiliar with Robinson’s work. “The Master” is about Abraham Lincoln and how he was misunderstood and derided by many, and not only by Southerners. The narration is first-person plural – Lincoln critics who outlived the martyred president and revised their judgment:

 

“A flying word from here and there

Has sown the name at which we sneered,

But soon the name was everywhere,

To be reviled and then revered:

A presence to be loved and feared,

We cannot hide it, or deny

That we, the gentlemen who jeered,

May be forgotten by and by.”

 

Snobbery was at the root of the jeering. Lincoln was born in Kentucky and had little formal education. He was an odd-looking man, tall, raw-boned, gawky, not pretty. He could never have been elected in the age of mass media. Many in the Northeastern elite found Lincoln uncouth and barely civilized. George Templeton Strong (1820-1875), the New York lawyer and diarist, famously described our greatest president as “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla.”

 

Robinson’s poem might have been improved by concision. Too many lines feel like padding -- an unusual occurrence in his work -- and too many ironies are heavy-handed. When Robinson deploys irony and does it successfully, it is subtle and even concealed. He may have seen something of Lincoln’s derisive reception in his own poetic arrival (helped along by a later president, Theodore Roosevelt). These lines from “The Master” might be autobiographical: “We doubted, even when he smiled, / Not knowing what he knew so well.” In an essay from 1970, “A Grave and Solitary Voice: An Appreciation of Edwin Arlington Robinson,” Irving Howe, of all people, writes:

“In my own experience Robinson is a poet who grows through rereading, or perhaps it would be better to say, one grows into being able to reread him. He will never please the crowds, neither the large one panting for platitude nor the small ones supposing paradox an escape from platitude.”