In a conversation with a well-read friend I had a disturbing realization: my love of American literature is rather constricted. I feel almost treasonous admitting this. It has nothing to do with politics. I remain a patriot, a lover of the Constitution, but my admiration for the classics of the American canon, dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is small. Henry James, above all. Melville, Dickinson, Twain, Cather, Eliot, Frost, a few others. I’m not sure why it took me so long to reach this conclusion. So many of the American writers I read enthusiastically when very young mean little or nothing to me today – Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Stephen Crane, et al.
The corollary question:
Where does my loyalty lie? I hardly have to contemplate an answer: English
literature. I think of Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson and George Eliot as mine
and it has nothing to do with citizenship. My first loyalty is to the language. In
terms of national literatures, Russian comes next, then probably Italian. I can’t
tell you how shocking these admissions are to me. Without giving it much
thought, I have unself-consciously practiced what used to be called “comparative
literature.” National origin has never meant much to me – with books or people.
My friend and I were
talking about Edwin Arlington Robinson when these thoughts came to me. He
remains one of my favorite American poets. I liked his work when young. Now I
prize it. Constance
Rourke writes in American Humor: A Study in the National Character (1931):
“Character had always been
the great American subject—character enwrapped in legend, from the Yankee of
the fables and the fabulous Crockett to the novels of Henry James. Character is
of course Robinson’s great subject . . .”
In this, Robinson is
almost novelistic. We can read him for his stories, most rooted in revelations
of character. When we think of Robinson we think of his people: “Luke Havergal,”
“Aaron Stark,” “Isaac and Archibald,” “Bewick Finzer” and the rest. Rourke goes
on:
“His main concern has been
with those elements of the mind which have made an almost continuous American preoccupation.
For a poet he is singularly unengaged by the outer world: the look of his
people, like his touches of landscape or other effects of setting, is drawn in
a few brief, intense passages: his genuine subject is fantasy, the evocation,
the obsession, the complex and indwelling emotion. He has placed the
psychological narrative within the realm of poetry in a new and modern sense,
and is an heir of both Hawthorne and Henry James . . .”
Take this poem about the
English poet “Thomas Hood” (1799-1845) from Robinson’s second collection, The
Children of the Night (1897):
“The man who cloaked his
bitterness within
This winding-sheet of puns
and pleasantries,
God never gave to look
with common eyes
Upon a world of anguish
and of sin:
His brother was the
branded man of Lynn;
And there are woven with
his jollities
The nameless and eternal
tragedies
That render hope and
hopelessness akin.
“We laugh, and crown him;
but anon we feel
A still chord
sorrow-swept,—a weird unrest
And thin dim shadows home
to midnight steal,
As if the very ghost of
mirth were dead—
As if the joys of time to
dream had fled,
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