'A Master Etcher of Human Portraits'

In celebration of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s fiftieth birthday, on December 22, 1919, seventeen poets and friends were asked to contribute to a symposium published a day earlier in the New York Times Book Review. All but Robert Frost contributed. Amy Lowell wrote: “A realist, [Robinson] is also a foe to materialism; a skeptic, his poems are full of spirituality. . . . Strong, virile, contemptuous of shams, no one has voiced the contradictory elements of the American character better than he.” A long-forgotten poet, Josephine Preston Peabody, rightly described Robinson as “a master etcher of human portraits.” 

Celebrations of writers and their work are too often either undeserved or staged long after they have done their best work, as a sort of consolation prize. That’s not the case with Robinson. He was in his poetic prime. Six months earlier he had published “The Mill” in The New Republic. On Christmas Eve, two days after his birthday, Robinson published “The Wandering Jew” in The Outlook (among its editors was former president Theodore Roosevelt, an early Robinson advocate). In his 1946 monograph, Yvor Winters described “The Wandering Jew” as “one of the great poems not only of our time but of our language.”

 

In the following year, 1920, Robinson would publish “Mr. Flood’s Party,” “Archbald’s Example,” “The Long Race” and “Many Are Called.” Rare is the poet who produces work of such quality so consistently in so short a time. “The Wandering Jew” is one of his two or three greatest poems, as in his final stanza:

 

“Whether he still defies or not

The failure of an angry task

That relegates him out of time

To chaos, I can only ask.

But as I knew him, so he was;

And somewhere among men to-day

Those old, unyielding eyes may flash,

And flinch—and look the other way.”

 

Robinson was born on this date, December 22, in 1869 and died in 1935 at age sixty-five.