'I Am Entirely Sure That I Like It'

On March 27, 1905, Theodore Roosevelt had just started his second term as president of the United States when he wrote a letter to a little-known poet living in Boston: 

Dear Mr. Robinson:

I have enjoyed your poems especially The Children of the Night so much that I must write to tell you so. Will you permit me to ask what you are doing and how you are getting along? I wish I could see you.

Sincerely yours,

Theodore Roosevelt

 

A teacher at Groton School, Henry Howe Richards, was an early admirer of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poetry and shared his enthusiasm with his students. Among them was Kermit Roosevelt (1889-1943), the president’s second son, who in turn recommended that his father read Robinson’s second collection, The Children of the Night (1897; reissued 1905). Roosevelt read some of the poems aloud during a cabinet meeting (“no doubt to the astonishment of the secretaries,” according to Robert Mezey) and invited Robinson to the White House. At the time, Robinson was living in poverty. In his biography of the poet, Scott Donaldson writes:

 

“Robinson was thunderstruck. His clothes were so shabby that he could not accept the president’s implied command to visit him. He responded at once, though, noting that ‘getting along’ barely did justice to his precarious existence.”

 

Roosevelt told advisers, Donaldson writes, “he might be able to locate ‘some position in the Government service, just as Walt Whitman and John Burroughs were given Government positions.’” The president offered him jobs as an “immigrant inspector” in Montreal and Mexico City. Robinson declined, though he eventually accepted a job at the New York Customs House, with a $2,000 a year stipend. Mezey writes, “It was understood by everyone that this was a sinecure; Robinson’s job was to write poetry. He went to the Custom House every morning, read the newspaper, folded it neatly on his desk, and left. I cannot think of another American president who has been so disinterestedly generous to a great writer.”

 

Roosevelt reviewed the second edition of The Children of the Night in The Outlook and wrote: “I am not sure I understand ‘Luke Havergal,’ but I am entirely sure that I like it.” In 1910, Robinson dedicated The Town Down the River to Roosevelt.

 

The Children of the Night contains some of Robinson's best and best-known poems: "House on the Hill," "Richard Cory," and “The Clerks.” Here is “Zola,” about the French novelist and courageous Dreyfusard:

 

“Because he puts the compromising chart

Of hell before your eyes, you are afraid;

Because he counts the price that you have paid

For innocence, and counts it from the start,

You loathe him. But he sees the human heart

Of God meanwhile, and in His hand was weighed

Your squeamish and emasculate crusade

Against the grim dominion of his art.

 

“Never until we conquer the uncouth

Connivings of our shamed indifference

(We call it Christian faith) are we to scan

The racked and shrieking hideousness of Truth

To find, in hate’s polluted self-defence

Throbbing, the pulse, the divine heart of man.”

 

In a letter to his friend Edith Brower on March 14, 1897 (Edwin Arlington Robinson's Letters to Edith Brower, 1968), the poet writes:

 

“Art for art’s sake is a confession of moral weakness. Art for the real Art’s sake is the meaning and the truth of life. This is just beginning to be understood, and it is on this understanding that the greatness of future literature stands. If [William Dean] Howells could realize this, he might write novels that would shake the world; as it is, his novels shake nothing but his own faith. I have the greatest admiration for the man, but I pity him. Zola is a parallel case, but his objective power is so enormous that his work must eventually have a purifying effect.”

 

Robinson is unfair to Howells (see Indian Summer, The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes) but shrewd about Zola. Purification followed just three years later in the form of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Robinson virtually predicts the waning of the genteel tradition and the coming of naturalism and other more robust strains of literature. In another letter, Robinson refers to Zola as “the greatest worker in the objective that the world had ever seen.” Personally, I think Zola’s novels are largely second-rate but I read them the way some people read thrillers.

 

[See The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (Modern Library, 1999), edited and with an excellent introduction and notes by Robert Mezey, and Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (Columbia University Press, 2007) by the late Scott Donaldson.]