'Understand Our Fellow Creatures a Little Better'

Edwin Arlington Robinson, not the sunniest of poets, writes to his friend Harry de Forest Smith on May 13, 1896: 

“If printed lines are good for anything, they are bound to be picked up some time; and then, if some poor devil of a man or woman feels any better or any stronger for anything that I have said, I shall have no fault to find with the scheme or anything in it. I am inclined to be a trifle solemn in my verses, but I intend that there shall always be at least a suggestion of something wiser than hatred, and something better than despair.”

 

Robinson never expounded a formal theory of poetry. He was too busy writing it and was not temperamentally given to sermonizing or abstract thought. His verse often has more in common with fiction than with the lyric poetry of his day (he wrote stories before poems). His characters do the talking, as in “Isaac and Archibald.” William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite was an African-American poet, anthologist and teacher who in 1913 asked Robinson what “message” he propounded in his poetry. Robinson replied:

 

“I suppose a part of it might be described as a faint hope of making a few of us understand our fellow creatures a little better, and to realize what a small difference there is, after all, between ourselves, as we are, and ourselves, not only as we might have been but would have been if our physical and temperamental make-up and our environment had been a little different.”    

 

Robinson seemed to think of his poems as a potential form of consolation, without ham-handed moralizing. He wanted readers to (a) draw pleasure from his words and narratives; (b) perhaps fortify their characters. He inherited a New England moral seriousness tempered by an understanding of human weakness. He implicitly endorses what Dr. Johnson writes in his review of Soame Jenyns’ A Free Enquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Evil: “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”