Poet in America

UNTRIANSULATED STARS, Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson to Harry de Forest Smith (348 pp.)--Edited by Denham Sutcliffe--Harvard University ($5).

In the life and work of Edwin Arlington Robinson there are plenty of signs that, for all his accomplishment, he never got what he was after. His poetry is racked by tension between its tightly controlled, dry surfaces and a subterranean shouldering towards something grander and more universal than he was able to express.

Even during his early youth "Win" Robinson was something of a puzzle to the citizens of his home town, Gardiner, Me. In his family he suffered from his status as the youngest--and unwanted--child, unable to gain the love of his inaccessible sexagenarian father. In the town his only kindred spirit was an eccentric doctor, more interested in composing vil-lanelles than in dosing colds. Among the boys & girls of his own age he was ill at ease, his mind roaming in regions they neither could nor wished to enter.

Odd Jobbing. Robinson's adolescent dream was to go to college, but his father spiked that because the oldest Robinson boy, Dean, had become a morphine addict after getting his M.D.; if that was the fruit of college learning, Edwin might better stay at home. Lonely and miserable, young Robinson lolled around the town, doing odd jobs and writing verses on the sly.

Almost his only confidant was a boy named Harry de Forest Smith, whose mind was also stuffed with echoes of books. Robinson once said that Smith was one person to whom he could "take his soul." While Smith was away at school, in 1890, the two boys began a regular correspondence that lasted until 1900 and briefly flared again in 1905.

The letters Robinson wrote to Smith have now been made public for the first time. Though not in themselves "great letters," they are a fascinating, often extremely moving record of the youthful travail of an American poet.

"I suppose," remarks Robinson in an early letter, "it does look a little queer to see me practically doing nothing at my age." These words touched on the festering sore of his conscience. Robinson could never quite accept the implications of his belief that "dollars are convenient things to have . . . but this diabolical, dirty race that men are running after them disgusts me. . . ." While bravely declaring "business be damned," he ruefully comments that "poetry is a good thing, provided a man is warm enough."

Sympathy for Failure. With a pathetically Spartan doggedness, he kept his letters on the impersonal plane of discussions of books, occasionally formulating a statement that now seems a remarkable presentiment of the basic theme of his subsequent work: "Solitude . . . tends to magnify one's ideas of individuality; it sharpens his sympathy for failure where fate has been abused ... it renders a man suspicious of the whole natural plan."

In 1891 Robinson's father permitted him to attend Harvard as a "special student." During his two years in Cambridge his letters bubble with reports of avid study, vast reading and literary enthusiasm. Yet he continued to suffer from the curse of his shyness; he self-consciously reports a search for "someone . . . with whom I can smoke a pipe and talk of Matthew Arnold." Robinson was aware of his social limitations; while visiting a professor's house, a girl took him under her wing, but "I do not think she was trying to seduce me . . . her eyes were too large and earnest." Never had Robinson known happier days; it is doubtful if he ever again knew such happy ones.

In 1893 his most miserable time began. He was forced to return to Gardiner because his father had died; the family funds were lost in the financial panic of that year. Yet none of these matters were discussed in his letters to Smith. He continued to write, instead, about Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold and Nathaniel Hawthorne. During these dreary years he was writing many of the poems that were later hailed as his masterpieces (Luke Haver gal, Richard Cory) and finding that he could place few of them in any magazine in the country. He kept his defeats to himself, letting them eat his soul.

In 1897 Robinson decided to make the great break. He went to New York, where he wrote poetry, worked for a while on a subway construction project, and sometimes nearly starved. Relief did not come until 1905, when Theodore Roosevelt, one of the few American Presidents who took a public interest in poetry, became enthusiastic over Robinson's verse and found him a sinecure, which gave him both a living and free time. But the years of loneliness and doubt had left a scar on Robinson's mind: failure remained his basic theme. Readers of this book may realize some of the suffering, the agony and the terrible consumption of human resources that go to make a poet in America.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.