'A Reticent Humor'

“For nearly twenty years after the publication of The Children of the Night in 1896, poetry comprised the only notable American literature.” 

A provocative statement that sends one scrambling for counter-examples, which aren’t difficult to find. Between 1896 and 1916 appeared Willa Cather’s early work and Henry James’ late, not to mention Theodore Dreiser, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton and O. Henry. Still, Constance Rourke’s grand generalization in American Humor: A Study in the National Character (1931) would have sparked a sometimes heated late-night bull session in the dormitory. She’s right about Maine-born Edwin Arlington Robinson, a consistent though muted comic writer. Rourke writes:

 

“Robinson is master of that unobtrusive irony that has belonged to the Yankee; like the older Yankee he turns constantly to a dry metaphor—‘an old vanity that is half as rich in salvage as old ashes.’ He has all but created a new form of blank verse; and not the least of the elements which have gone into its making is the rhythm of a taut, yet slowly moving Yankee speech.”

 

Consider, from The Children of the Night Robinson’s villanelle in trimeters, “The House on the Hill” and its closing lines:

 

“And our poor fancy-play

For them is wasted skill:

There is nothing more to say.

 

“There is ruin and decay

In the House on the Hill:

They are all gone away,

There is nothing more to say.”

 

No, not slapstick or bawdy. Something subtler. Rourke puts it like this: “A reticent humor runs through much of Robinson’s poetry, so quietly as to pass unnoticed by many readers, yet producing  a constant lighting and relief and change, with a balancing of forces against the impending tragedy. Tragedy has become his great theme; he uses that groundwork of defeat which had slowly come into the American consciousness: yet the outcome is not always wholly tragic; it is likely to be neither death nor destruction but a stripped acceptance of fate: within this range comes the great play of Robinson’s perception of character.”

 

Serious readers across a lifetime assemble and cull an ever-changing private canon, immune to the opinions of critics and other readers. Like A.E. Housman, Robinson has become essential to my portable library.