Collected Poems

by Edwin Arlington Robinson. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1921. 8vo, XI+591 pp. $3.50.

NOT since William Vaughn Moody’s poems and dramas were collected in the definitive edition after his death, has there been a more important or distinguished contribution to American verse than Edwin Arlington Robinson’s latest volume, the fruits of thirty years. Considered in its entirety, Mr. Robinson’s achievement makes an impression of spiritual seriousness which might be missed in isolated poems or small groups. The cynic tang is not the whole flavor.

But the first impression, in this day of slovenly metres and bastard rhythms, is of externals. What diversity and perfection of form are here; what sophisticated simplicity of expression, what stanzaic variety; what delicate precision of word and phrase! In the few instances of irregular metre, — ‘The Man Against the Sky’ is one, — how inevitable the rhythm! The sonnets alone, restrained and incisive, are a notable collection. And it is worth mentioning that these technical excellences touch perfection in 1890, and always after. The poet and his technique were at one, thirty years ago. Sometimes, it must be noted, virtue defeats itself in excess: the precise falls into the abyss of the cryptic, or the one word delicately chosen unlooses a bewildering flood of words all selected with equal insight, but too many. An involuted breathlessness, not unlike the less successful work of Browning, mars some of the longer poems, of 1902 as of 1920. To be obscure, to be wordy, these were Browning’s snares, and Robinson does not escape them, early or late.

But it is the content and color of his verse that arrest the reader, as they should, when the form is at its transparent flawless best. There is a deep and genuine melancholy in these poems; a brooding on the futility of life, that yet refuses to despair. The robust, contrarious optimism of Browning is alien to this disciple, although something in him withholds him from ultimate denial. If the heart and the height of his philosophy are touched in ‘The Man Against the Sky,”The Pilot,’ ‘Rembrandt to Rembrandt,’ then we have here no pessimist, though a spirit hard-pressed. The melancholy is ineradicable, in theme, in outlook; it is always there — cui bono? — in the darkling mirth of Vivian, in the mocking lilt of Miniver Cheevy, in the unrelieved horrors of Avon’s harvest, in the anguished dialogues between Guinevere, jealous of the Grail, and haunted, defeated Lancelot; in all the long picturegallery of heroes and derelicts which the poet has painted. Agnostic Clough and Matthew Arnold interpret life with a mellower sadness; except Clough, when he’s savage. But Robinson’s negation is never savage, and almost never mellow. Courage, lonely and undaunted, carries on for thirty years, in this volume.

FLORENCE CONVERSE.