'Thought, and Thought, and Thought and Thought'

Like Yvor Winters (one of his admirers), Edwin Arlington Robinson is seldom credited with having a sense of humor. Conventional understanding today judges him -- assuming anyone reads his poems -- a socially maladjusted New England tippler who wrote poems about unhappy people. His beginnings in rural Maine were unpromising. He went unnamed for months after his birth in 1869 because his parents had hoped for a daughter. In 1870 they organized a drawing to name him. A family friend drew “Edwin” from a hat and because the friend was from Arlington, Ma., they made it his middle name. 

His older brother became a doctor and scuttled his career with opium. His younger brother married the woman on whom Robinson had an unrequited crush and then retreated into alcoholism. The poet was forced to leave Harvard when the money ran out. All he had was a vocation for writing poetry. J.V. Cunningham observed that Robinson was “almost without biography.”

 

And yet, we have “Miniver Cheevy” (The Town Down the River, 1910), a muted, eight-stanza comic masterpiece. If a poet writes a single overtly comic poem, can we judge him a humorist? Robinson tells us nothing about Cheevy’s life – except, at the end, his drinking. No mention of education,  job, wife, children. Cheevy is an inveterate dreamer, even as an adult. His sensibility is childish:

 

“Miniver loved the Medici,

   Albeit he had never seen one;

He would have sinned incessantly

   Could he have been one.”

 

Live long enough and you’ll meet several Miniver Cheeveys, especially if you attend or work for a university. They are just too good for this life. The idealist’s perennial lament:

 

“Miniver scorned the gold he sought,

   But sore annoyed was he without it;

Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,

   And thought about it.”

 

Hypocritical, of course, but that’s the least of it. Call it self-willed paralysis. The fourth “thought” cinches it. If Cheevy weren’t so laughable and ridiculous he would be heartbreakingly sad, made even sadder by the suspicion that Robinson intended the poem at some level to be a self-portrait.