'A Place Remote and Islanded'

“If you will look in on me sometime in the summer of 2026, I may be able to tell you whether my things are going to last.” 

This is Edwin Arlington Robinson at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, writing to a friend on August 20, 1926. In effect he is proposing a fanciful literary experiment, and there was a time when I would have said he was being disingenuous. Of course his best work would survive, I thought, along with Emily Dickinson’s, T.S. Eliot’s and Yvor Winters’. But the culture has moved on and most of us no longer value poetry and other forms of literature as central to our values. We are, in effect, rejecting ourselves and the inheritance that made us. I’ll wager that Robinson is seldom taught in American high schools and universities, apart from "Richard Cory," thanks to Simon and Garfunkel.

 

Like many writers, Robinson’s character mingled thoughtfulness and modesty with egotism. What distinguishes him from most is his determination to remain his own man. No one owns him. In his poems and letters I detect no slavish following of fashion and no rah-rah politics. As a poet, he never raises his voice or turns hectoring. His stance as a solitary, diffident man and artist with, ironically perhaps, a gift for friendship, is likely unique in American literary history. He once told a correspondent: “I never could find any poetry in gathering apples. It is the worst work I know except washing dishes and listening to a debate.” Among his childhood chores in Gardiner, Maine, was picking apples in his family’s orchard.

 

Take one of Robinson’s finest poems, “Isaac and Archibald,” from Captain Craig: A Book of Poems (1902). It reads like a short story (he wrote fiction before writing poetry). Yvor Winters described it as “a kind of New England pastoral and is extraordinarily lovely.” It encourages us to inhabit the lives of four characters – the old men of the title, the narrator and his younger self. This arrangement of sympathetic ties mirrors life and the way we preserve it and transform it in memory. Robinson’s poem is closer to the way a great novelist works – say, Tolstoy or James – than to a typical lyrical poet. Here is Isaac speaking of himself in the third person, as though he were already dead, urging the narrator to remember; the narrator’s act of remembrance as a man of the boy he was; and the boy’s tacit sense that Isaac’s words are important and deserve to be remembered:

 

“’Look at me, my boy,

And when the time shall come for you to see

That I must follow after him, try then

To think of me, to bring me back again,

Just as I was to-day. Think of the place

Where we are sitting now, and think of me—

Think of old Isaac as you knew him then,

When you set out with him in August once

To see old Archibald.’—The words come back

Almost as Isaac must have uttered them,

And there comes with them a dry memory

Of something in my throat that would not move.”

 

Robinson’s imaginative projection into people unlike himself makes our human sympathy possible. Put bluntly, we want to know who these people are, why they do what they do, and why we share so much with them.

 

In February 1996, Robinson writes to his friend Harry De Forest Smith: “Three or four days ago, I took the liberty to borrow Henry James’s The Lesson of the Master and have read it to find that H. J. is a genius. No smaller word will do it for the man, who produced such work as this. Did you read it? If you didn’t, you must. If there is any more of his stuff out there let me know, and I shall try to read it, though I must take a rest for a time.” I savor the notion of reading Henry James’ “stuff.” Winters writes of Robinson in his 1946 monograph devoted to the poet:

 

“[H]is closest spiritual relatives, at least in America, are to be found in the writers of fiction and of history in his generation and the two or three generations preceding. I have called attention to his having certain more or less Jamesian vices as a narrator, but I am thinking now of his virtues: of the plain style, the rational statement, the psychological insight, the subdued irony, the high seriousness and the stubborn persistence. In respect to one or another of these qualities, one may find him related to such a mind as that of Henry James, but perhaps more obviously to Edith Wharton and [John Lathrop] Motley and Francis Parkman, and perhaps even at times to Henry Adams. He is, it seems to me, the last great American writer of their tradition, and not the first of a later one; and the fact that he writes verse is incidental . . . . Robinson is more closely comparable to the great masters of prose than to the minor poets.”

 

I think of another Maine native, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), and her novel The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Her narrator observes: “In the life of each of us there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.”