'A Milestone, Insignificant'

Understandably, readers and critics like to take credit for rediscovering forgotten writers and resuscitating their reputations. Imagine being the guy who, in 1909, read Moby-Dick (1851; out of print, 1887) and declared Melville (d. 1891) a genius a decade before Van Doren, Weaver, Mumford, et al. We can say the same of later neglected writers who had to wait decades before they were recognized – Daniel Fuchs and Henry Roth, for instance, not to mention Janet Lewis and Flann O’Brien --  and often forgotten again. Take the English poet Michael Roberts (1902-48), who makes cameo appearances in the lives of better-known writers. Once a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, he had the distinction of being thrown out of the party after one year when denounced as a “fascist.” 

Roberts is probably best remembered for editing the first edition of the influential Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936). His own poetry seems to go largely unread, overshadowed as he is by such contemporaries – and, admittedly, better poets – as Auden and MacNeice. He might have savored the irony of his own early poem, “On Reading Some Neglected Poets”:

 

“This is a long road in a dubious mist;

Not with any groan nor any heard complaint

We march, uncomprehending, not expecting Time

To show us beacons.

 

“When we have struggled on a little farther

This madness will yield of itself,

There will not be any singing or sudden joy,

But a load will be set down.

 

“And maybe no one will ever come,

No other traveller passing that way,

Therefore the load we lifted will be left,

A milestone, insignificant.”

 

With fewer people bothering to read much of anything worthwhile, how do we define “neglected poets” and other writers? In some quarters, Shakespeare is neglected. What about Edwin Arlington Robinson? Or Edward Gibbon? Don’t they all dwell “in a dubious mist”?