'Not Movement But Glaciation'

There’s an art to reviewing a book one doesn’t love but doesn’t hate, especially if the reviewer prizes the author’s earlier work. How to juggle critical rigor, honesty and tact? Turner Cassity, writing about Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Amaranth (1934), does it with confident grace. 

“Down There with E. A. R.: Amaranth” was published in Parnassus in 1993. Cassity was not a prolific writer of prose but some enterprising editor ought to collect and publish his essays and reviews (on Yvor Winters, Martial, Kipling’s verse, airships and himself, among other subjects). I’ve never read a dull one. He opens the Robinson piece like this:

 

“Encouraged, or rendered avaricious, by the success of Tristram in 1927—it sold over 60,000 copies—Edwin Arlington Robinson devoted the remaining years of his life to bringing out a long poem almost annually: Cavender's House (1929); The Glory of the Nightingales (1930); Matthias at the Door (1931); Talifer (1933); Amaranth (1934); and, posthumously in 1935, King Jasper.”

 

Robinson’s publishing history is a puzzle. His first volumes, published between 1896 and 1916, collect his finest and best-known work, all short poems, many of them character-based. He started out writing fiction and the story-telling impulse never left him. Later he published a series of long Arthurian poems (beginning with Merlin in 1917), collected three Pulitzer Prizes and finished with the volumes listed by Cassity, who writes:

 

“Taken as a group, the late narratives comprise a very curious body of work. Seamless in their prolixity, they occupy a full third of the 1500-page Collected Poems. So far as the tone is concerned, one can hardly tell where one poem ends and the next begins. These are obviously the work of a man who hated to finish a poem. It only meant searching for a new subject and starting over. The prolixity is line to line as well as in the overall concept.”

 

Harsh words for a poet who could write a novel in three quatrains. As is customary with Cassity, humor tempers disapproval:

 

“The subject matter of the [later] poems is as diverse as the tone is uniform. It is rather as if William Faulkner had been put through a blender. Cavender’s House is a ghost story; Nightingales is a vengeance tragedy; Matthias at the Door is a transcendental allegory; Talifer is a comedy of manners, a genre for which Robinson had about as much talent as Faulkner; King Jasper is a social allegory. . . . What the poems share is an absolute lack of pace. One wonders, and I am speaking quite seriously, if Robinson ever saw a film. One would think the most inattentive reading of, say, a Dickens novel would have made the poet see that his own work is not movement but glaciation.”

 

Cassity’s graceful cynicism is endlessly quotable. I can’t think of another critic who is half so serious and funny. Traditionally, reviewers find it easier to indulge in humor, ranging from rarified wit to raunchiness, when writing a purely dismissive review. Cassity goes on to quote his former teacher at Stanford, Yvor Winters, who published a monograph on Robinson in 1946:

“[Winters] has said that all of those losers [in Amaranth] are not worth the attention that Robinson gives them. The problems of genius manqué, the critic says, ‘do not embody a central problem of the spiritual life.’ Well, the failed geniuses are paralleled by the failed professional men, to say nothing of the incinerated passenger list, and failure is certainly a central problem of material life, that is to say real life. Platonically, we can all be successes. Or, as Ivy Compton-Burnett put it, more briefly than any philosopher ever would, ‘We most of us have a working respect for ourselves.’ Amaranth is the epic of those who have lost that, and must go on functioning. For triviality, comedy of manners cannot compare with philosophy.”

 

[Go here and scroll almost to the bottom to read “Down There with E. A. R.: Amaranth.”]