He showed a special affinity for difficult forms - rondeau, sestina, villanelle. (the Tilbury Town of his poems), was remarkable for his dedication to the study and practice of poetry. Forster's phrase about ''Main Street,'' by Sinclair Lewis. Of the continent in the world's imagination,'' to borrow E. With great charm, he was doing in verse what a whole generation of American writers was doing in stories and novels, both before and just after World War I: ''lodging a piece He spoke in a low American voice, and his stories Like Sarah Orne Jewett before him, Robinson wrote of Maine, his native state. Robinson's mordant long stories in verse also had their appeal for me, telling of New England, of places I recognized. Thought, and thought, and thought, / And thought about it.' ''That ''fourth made the intolerable touch of poetry. ''I remember the pleasure with which Pound and I laughed over the fourth 'thought' in 'Miniver Meeting Ezra Pound, in London in 1913, Robert Frost recalled how Robinson was the first poet they talked about. I didn't see that while Robinson's subjects are gloomy, his poems are emphatically not. The epitome of Robinson's gloom was the first of his published poems, ''Luke Havergal,'' a summons to suicide. Here's the fragment of a cityscape from his autobiographical ''Old Trails (Washington Square)'': ''And soon we found ourselves outside once more, / Where now the lamps along theĪvenue / Bloomed white for miles above an iron floor.'' The lonesomeness of that last line finds its rural equivalent in ''The Dark Hills'': He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,Īnd cried like a great baby half that night, I would not have you think that Reuben Brightįor when they told him that his wife must die, Here's an example, ''Reuben Bright,'' from ''The Children of the Night,'' published in 1897, when Robinson was 27:ĭid earn an honest living (and did right), And his poems were easy to memorize, with their ineluctable meters and never-failing I liked how Robinson treated them - archly, satirically, harshly, just as I thought they deserved. His subjectsĪre good-for-nothings, nonstarters, weaklings. When I was 14, his poems seemed agreeably gloomy to me. Have known and loved the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson for practically 50 years. JBOOKEND / By BEN SONNENBERG The Modernist From Maine
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