An American Poet
IT says something for the perception of Theodore Roosevelt that he was one of the first to befriend Edwin Arlington Robinson and to recognise the virtues of the obscure young poet from Maine. The fact was not, however, fortuitous. That muscular President was conscious in his own way of the promise for literature of American life. He recognised in Robinson's work something authentic, vigorous and, above all, masculine at-a time when American poetry was genteel, derivative and, as Professor Neff points out, governed by the limited tastes of a largely feminine public. Here was someone writing with gusto, humour and a vast sympathy about the " sordid reality " of human experience in a small New England town, not merely about the narrow range of " poetic " experience, of beauty, nature and romantic love, which alone had come to be the accepted themes of American poetry.
In the width and steadiness of his vision, his mingling of humour and tragedy, his classical temper and his mastery of varied poetic techniques Robinson represented something hew in his generation. It is hardly surprising that recognition of his talent was delayed, although one must lament with his biographer the resultant interval between The Children of the Night, published in 1897, and the poetic revival in America which took place just before the First World War. That recognition came in full measure before the poet's death in 1935, and it is no matter for surprise that the second volume of the new American Men of Letters Series should be devoted to him, nor that the writer should consider Robinson to have written, in " The Man Against the Sky," the " most impressive " poem in American literature.
Robinson's genius has long been recognised in this country. Alfred Noyes as long ago as 1913 considered him to be the best poet writing in America ; and if J. C. Squire rejected him from a study of American poets in 1925 as being too Englishin temper to represent the land of Whitman, younger poets like Auden were soon reading him with entInuitism. Professor Neff is justified 'in maintaining that English readers an recognise in his work qualities of Words- worth, Hardy, Hotisman and Yeats as well as a feeling for the classics which is more English than American.
Robinson's life makes an absorbing story in spite of being com- paratively uneventful. The drift from Gardiner, Maine, via Harvard to New York City did not take him far from his local origins ; its most dramatic episode, the spell as time-keeper underground during the building of the New York subway, is commonplace enough, and can be paralleled by his contemporaries—Vachel Lindsay, for example, who was peddling his picture-poems for a couple of cents up and down Third Avenue.,
What holds the attention is the tenacity with which Robinson applied himself to his craft in the face of the disapproval of a go- getting society and without any encouragement from an accepted poetic tradition. This is admirably brought out by Professor Neff, who, both as a critic and as a friend of Robinson, is well qualified to write the first critical biography. The story is clearly told, and its tone is informal and direct. In spite of its author's high opinion of Robinson's talent, fulsomeness and self-conscious over-emphasis are entirely absent. If the book has a fault, it lies in the modesty of its approach. The facts are relied on too heavily to speak for themselves in a career so externally uneventkl, and there is a need here and there for a' more subjective interpretation of the poet's personal development. Only in the concluding chapter does the author venture upon a real estimate of the man, and here he is concerned with Robinson's place. in American letters rather than with a critical examination of the special quality bf his mind.
FRANK TtummuwArrs.
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