American Poet

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON (318 pp.)--Ellsworth Barnard--Macmillan ($4.75).

Six months after her son's birth in December 1869, Mrs. Robinson of Head Tide, Me. had not got around to naming the baby, her third. Distressed by this, a lady from Arlington, Mass, suggested picking a name from a hat. Out of the hat came a slip marked "Edwin." Well pleased, Mother Robinson tacked on "Arlington" in honor of the lady from Massachusetts, and Edwin Arlington Robinson was tagged with the first of many labels.

"Failure" was one of the tags he applied to himself for a long time. "Poet" was another, but Edwin Arlington Robinson was 53 before the U.S. recognized that he was a major one.

Duffer at Harvard. Robinson's father was reluctant to let him go to college, because one of Edwin's older brothers had gone to college to study medicine, and had become, by 29, an addict to his own morphine bottle. Father Robinson at last gave grudging consent for the boy to attend classes at Harvard, though lack of credits made him a "special student."

Robinson was happy at Harvard, if a bit of a social duffer. Women terrified him (he was to remain a bachelor all his life), and he felt that dancing lowered a man's "natural dignity." Painfully shy, he preferred to "smoke a pipe and talk of Matthew Arnold."

A year after his father died, Robinson had to leave Harvard and go back to Maine. But he could not keep his mind on his chores around the house; he was devoured by the "itch for authorship." At 27 he scraped together $52 and privately published his first book of poems. Critics were polite, the public was indifferent. At 30 Robinson tried again. He took a small family inheritance and moved to New York. He was soon living on a diet of beans, apples and rejection slips. When he had enough rejected poems for another book, he scouted vainly for a publisher. One house stalled him off for a year. The truth was that a member of the firm had mislaid the manuscript in a brothel.

Discovered by T.R. Literary friends banded together to get the book published, but it made no bigger dent than the first one. Despondent, Robinson began hitting the bottle and living on loans and handouts from his friends. In 1903, when New York City was building its first subway, he took a job as time-checker. The first day, the nearsighted poet fell into an excavation, but he stuck with the job, ten hours a day at $2 a day for nine months. At night he drowned his frustration in cheap whisky. To a friend he wrote: "I was a tragedy in the beginning, and it is hardly probable that I shall ever be anything else. What manner of cave I shall select for a time is of no real importance."

But the "Poet in the Subway" (as a sensational article in the New York World dubbed him) was about to get a lift. A book review helped to do it, mostly because the reviewer was President Theodore Roosevelt. His young son Kermit had sent him the revamped edition of Robinson's first book, and the excited T.R. prodded Scribner's into reissuing it. In his review in the Outlook, T.R. foreshadowed many a Robinson admirer since by admitting: "I am not sure I understand Luke Havergal; but I am entirely sure I like it."

Bestseller at 58. In the meantime, Roosevelt gave Robinson practical help in the form of a $2,000-a-year sinecure with the Customs Bureau. Robinson never quite knew what his duties were, and in 1909, when incoming Taft appointees demanded that he perform them, he resigned. But he was never again reduced to a mean struggle for subsistence. His verse flowed out increasingly in long dramatic poems, such as Merlin, Lancelot, and Tristram, written around the Arthurian legends. In time, he won three Pulitzer Prizes (1922, 1925, 1927), lived to see Tristram become such a bestseller in 1927 that it earned him royalties of $15,000.

In his critical study, Author Ellsworth Barnard scans the poet's lines closely, deliberately scants the poet's life. His book is the poorer for it, for in Robinson's case one of the clues to what he is driving at is knowledge of what he was driven by. When Critic Barnard is not busy unraveling the poet's knottier lines, he sees Robinson pretty much the way Robinson eventually saw himself: as an "idealist" in philosophy, a traditionalist in verse form, a liberal humanist in spirit.

The Optimist. Edwin Arlington Robinson was the only sizable poet the U.S. had between Emily Dickinson and the poetic renaissance around World War I sparked by Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters. Robinson found the poetic landscape "flowing with milk and water." He injected the gall & wormwood of realism. In general, he celebrated the individual, not by tracking the footprints of great men, but by tracing the soul-prints of weak ones. The Miniver Cheevys, the Richard Corys, the fumblers, the failures, the souses were not freaks to him but symbols of man's suffering lot. Calling himself a man "born with my skin inside out," he could not resign himself to man's fate, nor could he elevate its meaning much beyond his own strange and terrible endurance.

Why are we as we are? We do not know.

Why do we pay so heavily for so little?

Or for so much? Or for whatever it is?

We do not know. We only pay, and die.

Nonetheless, he called himself "the damndest optimist that ever lived." And in his stoic dedication to his vocation, he certainly acted as though he was. When an early critic accused him of seeing the world as a "prison house," he retorted: "The world is not a 'prison house' but a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks."

Robinson picked up quite a few wrong blocks himself, but also enough right ones to spell American poet.

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