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Transformations in American Literature
The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson
by
Michael Dellert
The period of the late 19th century was a time of great transformations in American literature. The theories of Darwin and Freud alienated man from himself physically and psychically by removing his freedom of choice from his determination of himself, and Herbert Spencer, the evolutionary philosopher, and Karl Marx, the evolutionary socio-economist, alienated man from his social, economic, and political institutions, by attributing change in those institutions to impersonal forces beyond man’s control. From the seeds of these theories arose 19th century naturalist philosophy, a pessimistic version of determinism, in which man exists in an indifferent, alien, and often hostile world with no control over the chaotic forces of change which shape his life. Coupled with a loss of faith in Christian religious institutions, the modern man of 19th century naturalism lived an isolated, alienated life in an indifferent and unsympathetic universe, a state familiar to readers of Modernist poetry of the early 20th century, as well as to readers of Edwin Arlington Robinson.
Although not considered a Modern poet in the sense that T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are considered Modern, Robinson is nonetheless an important transitional figure in the American literature of the fin-de-siecle. His most famous poems, the psychological character sketches in verse of the inhabitants of the fictional Tilbury Town, Maine, live “lives of quiet desperation,” as Thoreau said. They are always isolated characters, often marginalized from their fellow townspeople, and frequently tragic, characteristics found in such Modern characters as J.Alfred Prufrock and Hugh Selwyn Mauberly. Additionally, the world which Robinson’s characters inhabit is bleak and meaningless, devoid of the vitality of a thriving civilization.
In Luke Havergal, for instance, “there is not a dawn in eastern skies/ To rift the fiery night that’s in [Luke’s] eyes” (ll. 9-10), and “God slays Himself with every leaf that flies” (ll.13). Luke himself is tragic and isolated; his lover or wife has apparently died {“there is yet one way to where she is,/Bitter, but one that faith may never miss” (ll. 21-22) says the voice “Out of a grave” (ll. 17-18)}, and Luke is apparently contemplating suicide to end his grief and perhaps reunite with his lost love beyond this veil of tears {“The western gate” in lines 1, 7, 25, and 31, is an allusion to the lands of the dead common to the mythologies of pre-Christian Europe (cf. Tir-nan-Og and Annwn of Celtic myth, Ultima Thule, Hades, etc)}. And while the poem itself is in the traditional form of an Horatian ode, as used by such a poet as John Keats (Ode to a Nightingale; Ode to Psyche), the unusual rhyme scheme (aabbaaaa) and the unnatural change of meter in each octet, from iambic pentameter in lines 1-7 to iambic dimeter in line 8, which echoes the final two iambs of line 7, combine with the sinister imagery of the poem to create an unnerving and eerie emotional experience of despair and hopelessness. “No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies--/ In eastern skies” (ll. 15-16).
Robinson mixes other traditional forms with Modernist sentiments. In The Clerks, Robinson combines the form of the Petrarchan love sonnet with the subject matter of clerks at a clothiers’. His use of very common language echoes the innovations of Walt Whitman, while the sonnet form, with its regular rhyme and metrical rhythm, gives it a nostalgic wistfulness and seems to elevate the subject matter from its own commonality. Robinson’s tone becomes antagonistic toward the older authors of his age, “you that ache so much to be sublime,/ And you that feed yourselves with your descent,/ What comes of all your visions and your fears?” (ll. 9-11) and then denounces them for what they are, “but the clerks of Time” (ll. 12) and thus no better than the common men, the clerks, who are the initial subjects of his poem. And in the poem Cliff Klingenhagen, Robinson again uses the basic Petrarchan love sonnet form, but changes the rhyme scheme from the traditional abbaabba-abcabc to the innovative abbaacca-defdef. He also introduces the only redemptive course available to modern, naturalistic man in a world devoid of moral certitude: help one another (cf. Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat).
Finally, in Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy, the poet introduces another element of Modernism, the sense of the lost tradition, the fragmented heritage of Western culture. Miniver Cheevy is a man dissatisfied with the modern world, a man who “cursed the commonplace/ And eyed a khaki suit with loathing” (ll. 21-22). Cheevy longs for “the days of old” (ll. 5), “Thebes and Camelot,/ And Priam’s neighbors” (ll.11-12), and “the mediaeval grace/ Of iron clothing” (ll. 23-24), but his longing is not for the historical heritage of his cultural past, but for a mythical, Romantic past which never truly existed. Cheevy is a soul isolated from himself in the present, seeking self-identity in the glories of the mythical past, while destroying himself in the near future (“called it fate,/ And kept on drinking”, ll. 31-32). Miniver Cheevy is Robinson’s Prufrock.
Thus, though not truly a Modern poet, Robinson’s poetry is important as an example of the transition occurring between the Victorian and Modernist periods. The break from traditional regularities of rhythm, rhyme and stanzaic patterns, the use of oblique meaning and unconventional syntax, the psychological portrait of the common man, the indifferent naturalistic universe and decaying social, economic, and political institutions, and the fragmentation of Western culture are all elements of both Modernism and the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, while his adherence to traditional forms such as the Horatian ode and the Petrarchan sonnet, no matter how modified, connect him with the previous Victorian age.