2
father was opposing higher education, he built a large library in his house,
containing the works of major old and new writers, especially in poetry. The
library was the food for Robinson from the age of five when he was reading The
Raven aloud to his family
13
. Robinson was reading Shakespeare at the age of
seven and he indulged with his father in reading Bryant’s: A Library of Poetry
and Song
14
. Robinson started writing poetry at the age of eleven and he used to
attend the local society of poetry
15
. That society was really a little poetry club
founded by Caroline Davenport Swan to whom Robinson was introduced by his
neighbour and family doctor Alanson Tucker Schumann
16
. At the age of
seventeen, Robinson made a blank verse translation of Cicero’s: “First Oration
Against Catiline.”
17
His first essay “Bores” was published in The Amateur
school literary journal, and his first poem “Thalia” was published, 29, March
1890 in The Reporter Monthly which was issued in Gardiner, Maine and his
metrical translation “ The Galley Race,” from book V of the Aeneid, was also
published in the same journal 31 May
18
. Robinson was graduated from Gardiner
high school in 1880, when he met Emma Sheppard, his great love in his life, at a
dancing school, he introduced her to his oldest brother Herman
19
. Herman
convinced her to marry him.
20
Some sources said that Herman wasted the family
fortune in a weak-designed business, but in reality, the loss was a result of the
national economic panic of 1893.
21
This matter affected Herman’s marriage, and
made him indulge in alcoholic drinking, then he contracted tuberculosis and died
in 1909.
22
Robinson remained unmarried though he had undergone two love
experiences.
23
The first and true experience was with Emma Sheppard who
married his brother Herman.
24
She appreciated Robinson’s poetry and
encouraged him but she preferred Herman the successful and brilliant business
man at that time.
25
Chard Powers Smith stated two points of view about that
case.
26
One view was that Emma looked sisterly to Edwin, and this view was
consolidated by the evidence that Edwin had proposed several times to Emma
after Herman’s death, at least in 1909, 1918 and in 1928 without any result
27
.
3
These proposals might interpret why Robinson didn’t marry at all. As in one of
his poems, his tongue might say: “ what is it in me that you like so much, / and
love so little?”
28
The second view that Emma really loved Robinson, but she
loved Herman superficially.
29
This view might be reasoned by the fact that
Herman was a successful business man and she loved the prosperity which
Herman might offer. The second experience was with Mabel Moore whom he
taught French.
30
In a letter to his friend Harry De Forest Smith on the occasion
of the latter engagement, the envious tone was obvious and the regression to the
past was attributed to his unmarried state; “You are engaged to be married, you
are happy, and the world and the future look bright in your eyes; I am not (now)
engaged to be married, I am not happy, and the world and the future look so
dark and gloomy that I look mostly into the past.”
31
Really, there is no decisive
evidence for the reason behind Robinson’s disinclination for marriage though he
once said that he could either write poetry and devote his life for it or make a
family.
32
Robinson studied literature, French, and philosophy, as a special student
at Harvard University for two years 1891-1893.
33
He found an opportunity to
publish five of his poems in The Harvard Advocate, but he couldn’t publish any
poem in The Harvard Monthly, the famous periodical of Harvard University.
34
In one of his letters to his friend H.D.F. Smith, Robinson described his feelings
at Harvard after two weeks had passed,
I have been feeling by turns hopeful and blue,
for the past two weeks; it is the change, more
than any thing else, I suppose. But the fact is, I
am not fixed upon the firmest footing possible; I
am where I have no business.
35
In the midst of his studying at Harvard, his father died in 1892, but he
didn’t return home until the panic in 1893 when the family’s fortune faded
4
away.
36
Robinson worked for a short time between January and June 1899, as a
secretary at Harvard University in the office of its president Charles W. Eliot.
37
In 1896, Robinson’s mother was infected by “black diphtheria” and soon died.
38
These tragedies; death, addiction, failure, and financial catastrophe, were
reflected in his early poems which he published in 1896, by the assistance of his
friends under the title The Torrent and The Night Before.
39
In 1897, Robinson
published the book again under a new title The Children of the Night, where
two poems were deleted from the first and sixteen poems were added to the
second, with the support of his friends also.
40
In 1902, Captain Craig was also
published by the payments of Robinson’s friends, though it had been rejected by
five publishers.
41
Ignorance was practised by the critics upon Robinson’s earlier
works except Trumbell Stickney in The Harvard Monthly , and Edmund
Clarence Stedman in his anthology who praised his poetry, while other critics
caused Robinson’s depression and alcoholic indulgence.
42
The assistance of
Robinson’s friends either in publishing books or in proceeding life was a
remarkable thing though the deterioration of social relationships had reached
high levels. Robinson moved from job to job; in New York (1903-4), he worked
as a time keeper in a subway construction for cheap wages and lived in
Manhattan in the “meanest little house on a mean street.”
43
Van Wyck Brooks
described Robinson’s coming to New York as follows: “Abandoning New
England, he had carried to New York an aura of blight, desolation, decay, and
defeat.”
44
Shortly after this deepest point of poverty, the “ glimmer of light ”
tended to rise in Robinson’s life.
I.1.1. PURITAN INFLUENCE
Robinson was one of the descendent of Anne Bradstreet (1612?-72); the
poetess of the first generation of New Englanders.
45
She was closely related to
the governors of the colony of Massachusetts and her other famous descendents:
the Channings, the Danas, and the Holmes.
46
New England was the colony of
5
the first immigrants of pilgrims and Puritans when they came to America in the
seventeenth century to build the city of God.
47
New England was anointed by
some New England writers, such as Cotton Mather who wrote that “ a man of
sense might almost statistically infer New England to be specially favoured by
God.”
48
The first reference to the Puritans was during the reign of Queen
Elizabeth I (1558-1603) to denote those “ who wished to ‘ purify’ the forms and
rituals which they felt too closely resembled those of the church of Rome.”
49
Puritanism was evolved from the conflict between Protestant reformers and the
Catholic Church.
50
The Puritans had seized power in England during
Cromwell’s revolution (1649-1660), but they suffered later from oppression
during the Restoration which brought about their flee to New England.
51
In
1628, the Puritans established in America the “ Massachusetts Bay Colony,” and
their religious purposes were intermingled with their economic drives to form
their new world.
52
However, the Puritans’ dream of theocratic state had
gradually vanished.
53
New England expressed its individuality which was demonstrated in a
large variety of churches.
54
Gardiner, the town where Robinson spent his youth,
was an example of this variety. It consisted of churches as: “Episcopal,
Congregational, Free Will Baptist, Universalist, and Roman Catholic,” as well
as the Methodist and the Swedenborgist.
55
Puritanism may be regarded as “a set of theological doctrines known as
Calvinism or to a cluster of negative attitudes about morality which are
outgrowths of the dogma itself.”
56
Its doctrines might be “ summed up in the
ideas of original sin, predestination, grace and election.”
57
Calvinism in New
England had undergone several dissents “most of which had attacked the
authority of the clergy and had stressed the need for individual practicality and
self-reliance.”
58
One of the important dissenting trends was Unitarianism. Dr
Freeman, the Bostonian Minister and William Ellery Channing, started this
religious movement which denied the dogma of the Trinity, the divine nature of
Jesus, and the creed of Christianity, considering it as a certain way of life.
59
In
6
this respect, there were several similarities between Unitarianism and Deism.
60
Robinson’s family took Unitarianism as its worship like most of the wealthiest
families in Boston.
61
Unitarianism had a great effect on New England that
“impelled the following generation [1840s] to that outbreak of intellectual and
spiritual anarchy which is generally called Transcendentalism.”
62
The literary
background of New England intellectuals was “ either a Unitarian or closely
associated with Unitarian influences.”
63
Unitarian liberal doctrines had affected
Robinson’s mind and made him religious “but without dogmatism of any
particular sect or creed.. Robinson had already rejected Calvinism and the
Orthodox conception of heaven and hell.”
64
Transcendentalism swept Europe at
the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century.
65
In that period the old structure of society was to be undermined and “ the feudal
and ecclesiastical tyrannies and customs” were to be turned up by new liberal
institutions.
67
Transcendentalism concentrated “on the intuition and the
conscience, a form of idealism; a philosophical romanticism reaching America a
generation or two after it developed in Europe.”
67
It had deep roots in the
“ancient and modern European philosophers (particularly Emanuel Kant) and
sponsored in America chiefly by Emerson after he had absorbed it from Thomas
Carlyle, Samuel Tylor Coleridge, Johann Goethe, and others.”
68
The
evolutionary philosophy divided knowledge into two branches: the knowable,
which can be tested or experimented and the unknowable, which cannot be
experimented.
69
The unknowable knowledge is related to Transcendentalism,
where it lurks beyond senses as a supernatural force. The major theme of
Transcendentalism was “the conviction that the individual has a natural right to
believe for himself and freely to express his belief.”
70
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-82), the poet and the philosopher, was the eminent figure of
Transcendentalism.
71
Emerson believed in the special relationship between the
human being and God without any intermediation between them.
72
He
reconciled between the law of Nature and the law of God or between the realist
and the idealist.
73
In a letter to his friend H.D.F Smith , Robinson admits that he
7
is an idealist, he says: “ I am very glad to be able to stand up and say that I am
an idealist. Perhaps idealism is the philosophy of desperation but I do not think
so.”
74
The admittance affirmed his choice between “materialism and some neo-
romantic alternative,” therefore; “he looked back into his new England heritage
and found Emerson.”
75
The New England heritage was too heavy that Robinson
and the other new Englanders wished to overthrow it as Van Wyck Brooks said :
The Yankees were writing again with talent and
vigour, and the new writers, appearances not-with-
standing, remained in the new England tradition
which they seemed to flout. They sometimes
thought they were outside it, they sometimes
wished to be outside it, but unconsciously they were
within it, which was more important; and was it
not part of their tradition, that they should flout
tradition, even as the greatest of the Yankees had
flouted it before them? That one should flout
tradition was the first of laws for Emerson’s
heirs.
76
Robinson inherited from New England “a Hawthornesque power of
blackness as well as Emersonian light.”
77
Hawthorn’s theme of human solitude
affected Robinson and was demonstrated in many poems especially of his earlier
work.
78
Robinson as a New England poet had several similarities with
Hawthorne, in which they were both less transcendentalists, “skeptical, solitary,
profoundly aware of the ambiguities that forever link self-reliance and
solitude.”
79
Not only “the religious toughness” that characterized the New
Englanders as Van Wyck Brooks said in his introduction to A New England
Reader, but also the affirmation of “the old world of New England, faith in the
individual, a passion for justice, a love of life and a clear belief in its ultimate
8
goodness.”
80
In this statement, Brooks showed that “faith in the individual” was
a positive quality which was associated with the “love of life” and “goodness”
but Roy Harvey Pearce had a different idea. In his analysis of Robinson’s “Eros
Turannos” , Pearce saw “individualism”, as traditionally related to the New
England town, a quality of failure to communicate in American society .
81
New
England literature was distinguished in the proceeding of American literature so
that “the New England segment of American literature remained for a hundred
years more powerful and more interesting than any other.”
82
Puritan tradition as exemplified in William Cullen Bryant, Emerson , and
Nathaniel Hawthorne , was “a strong sense of moral integrity, a highly
developed conscience , a concern with the inner man , and strength of
character.”
83
To Robinson, the Puritan tradition was a major characteristic
element in his personality, not as a poisonous factor nor as an outworn tradition
as Amy Lowell accused Robinson.
84
But as Anderson said , this poison
“resulted, not from decadent Puritanism alone, but from congeries of forces that
piled up increasingly during Robinson’s lifetime”.
85
Emerson and other
transcendentalists run away from the austerity of Puritanism to the spiritual
individuality where every one could practise his own rituals freely.
Transcendentalism dominated “the New England authors as to become a literary
movement as well as a philosophic conception.”
86
Robinson, in his strain of
solitude , was responsive to the individuality in Unitarianism and consequently
in Transcendentalism,
as an heir of the New England traditions of
Puritanism and Transcendentalism, with their
emphasis upon the individual, Robinson has been
termed a sober transcendentalist who dealt
primarily with the ethical conflicts within the
individual, and measured the value of the isolated
person by his truth to himself.
87
9
Robinson was “the last of the old New England poets who was also the
first of the new.”
88
Louise Bogan stated that “Robinson’s reaction to events and
his conclusions concerning human life and destiny continued to be based on the
idealism of his youth , to which was added a simple variety of agnosticism and
stoicism.”
89
Robinson as an inheritor to the “idealism of Emerson and the
skepticism of Dickinson,”
90
as well as of the moral and scientific change of the
age resembled “an end product of New England town civilization.”
91
Emily
Dickinson (1830-86) was the last New Englander who left her prints on the
1890s “although Miss Dickinson’s New England strain had advanced straight
from Puritan mores, untouched , and even repelled , by Unitarian reform.”
92
Bogan saw in Robinson “the dry sense of humor of the New England townsman;
and his bent was toward realism.”
93
But this was one side of Robinson’s
personality that Bogan had seen. The other side was idealism, which
accompanied him all of his life. The dualism in Robinson’s character might be
one element of Emerson’s legacy or it was formed because Robinson lived in
the strong current of change due to many variables in the 1890s and the turn of
the twentieth century.
Robinson’s philosophical idealism was said to come through his instructor
Josiah Royce, when he taught him the philosophy of German idealists.
94
Robinson’s sketches of characters in the imaginary Tilbury Town were so
idealized that “few men were saints enough to possess the perfect love and
wisdom of which Emerson wrote.”
95
Emerson’s ideas constituted an important
element in Robinson’s idealism and his persistent searching “to find spiritual
meaning in a mechanistic world.”
96
Emerson’s influence on Robinson is obvious
in the latter’s believing “in the unknowable constants that govern the human
being from within; in addition, he had the sort of mind that sees history as a
unity in which these human constants appear in dramatic form.”
97
The
unknowable constants that Robinson believed in, were related to
transcendentalism. It can be said that “the core of transcendentalism that runs
through Robinson’s poetry derives from his reading of Carlyle and Emerson.”
98
10
Robinson had read Emerson’s “The Over-Soul” and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.
99
Robinson highly esteemed Emerson as an essayist as well as a poet and the
latter’s influence pervaded his early works, especially some poems in The
Children of the Night ; “Kosmos” , “Supremacy” and “Octaves” , and it was
also seen in “Captain Craig.”
100
But as Williams J. Free said, asserting Edwin S.
Fussell’s idea that “no one has been able to point with certainty to specific
Emersonian ideas in specific Robinson’s poems.”
101
Robinson had read
Emerson’s “Compensation” as he told his friend Smith and he could understand
Emerson’s theory of compensation .
102
The inferiority of man towards God
suggests the law of compensation. Presumably, man can not arrive at the
integrity or the absolute truth identified with God , so that man needs a
compensation to achieve his equilibrium. Emerson believes that in order to get
wisdom, man had to endure painful experience and this idea was closely related
to Robinson’s poetry and statements;
103
one of them was that “there’s [a] good
deal to live for, but a man had to go through hell really to find it out,”
104
or in
Free’s words “Robinson found hell worth enduring for the compensating
knowledge of life’s value.”
105
Another source of Robinson’s mystical experience and his “early
transcendentalism was grounded in the teachings of Swedenborg.”
106
Robinson’s
mystical experience was beyond humanity and much larger , it was intellectual ,
so that he might be considered as “half a transcendentalist,”
107
or as Anderson
said, “it is more meaningful to define Robinson’s idealism as modified
transcendentalism.”
108
He was unlike Emerson or Whitman whom he greatly
admired because his destroyed life prevented him from finding “the exuberance,
the Joie de vivre [joy of living] , that was given to them by their confidence in
humanity’s capacity to discover that stupendous entity and merge with it.”
109
This opinion coincides with Charles T. Davis’ interpretation of Robinson’s
“own constitutional unreadiness to accept transcendental definitions of man and
the world , definitions which he found attractive and satisfying in many
ways.”
110
Davis saw that Robinson’s philosophical idealism was related to
11
Emerson’s transcendentalism” but by King Jasper (1935), Robinson’s last
extended narrative, his idealism had been reduced to a stubborn faith in the
power of the human mind and spirit to survive, despite the catastrophe which
seemed to follow inevitably man’s blind pursuit of the material.”
111
His obvious
New England qualities were “his austerity and his horror of exuberance of
expression,” and “his violent and controlled passion.”
112
Robinson described his
state as an “optimistic desperation” and himself as a “transcendental optimist ,”
though he was not identical with the typical transcendental opinion of nature the
third column of the transcendental trinity; God , man , and nature.
113
Richard
Cary saw Robinson as a pessimistic poet especially in his earlier works and he
attributed this quality to the age in which the change from agriculture to industry
was accelerated and the appearance of Darwinism and the scientific or material
way of thinking.
114
Robinson , as one of the traditionalists in America as the late
Victorians at the end of the nineteenth century , were “troubled rather than
shattered by the impact of science on faith and by the disintegration of values
that had stood the test of centuries.”
115
In fact , the case of traditionalism was
related to the aristocratic South rather than the austere but a somewhat
democratic New England.
116
New England had changed and its “standards had
deteriorated in the period after the civil war , and [Henry] Adams , Henry James,
and Robinson could no longer live there.”
117
In his poetry , Robinson , as
Edmund Wilson stated : “was preoccupied with New England in decay.”
118
As
Robinson was constituted of “a traditionally New England mind , he was
generally regarded as a herald of the poetic awakening of the pre-world war
America.”
119
New England influence is seen in most of his poems and very clear
in “New England”, “Boston”, “The House on the Hill” , and “The Gift of God”.
Robinson’s roots in New England granted him a deep look to the past and the
present , and nourished him with the ability to probe the future. Robinson , “in
his reticent , slightly morbid , profoundly contemplative , and stoical
personality,”
120
could transcend his perplexity towards the heavy atrocities of
life. Robinson didn’t find out that he lived in a prison-house as Harry Thurston
12
Peck , the reviewer in The Bookman said , but his perplexity and the absorbed
skeptism of the age drove him to say “the world is not ‘prison-house’, but a kind
of spiritual kindergarten , where millions of the bewildered infants are trying to
spell God with wrong blocks.”
121
Yet , in the last line of his poem “Credo” ,
Robinson referred to the remains of his faith in “the coming glory of the light”
122
I.1.2 WORKS
Robinson was a prolific poet and his production was larger than any
important American poet as well as that “the range of his philosophy was
broader, his emotion deeper, his imagination richer, than that of any other poet
of his age.”
123
As it was said before , Robinson’s earlier work The Children of
the Night was published in 1897 , and Captain Craig in 1902. In 1910,
Robinson published The Town Down the River which was received by some
critics’ favour such as in New York Times and Boston Transcript where the
editor of the latter William Stanley Braithwaite was too enthusiastic ; he
declared that Robinson was “America’s Foremost Poet.”
124
For some years,
Robinson devoted himself to writing unsuccessful prose plays ; Van Zoren was
published in 1914 and faced failure at the stage ; Porcupine was published in
1915 and never be presented.
125
From 1911 henceforth till the end of his life ,
Robinson spent every summer at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough ,
Newhampshire where the artists and writers met and practised their creative
works.
126
The first real success which brought great reputation especially
among the critics was the publication of Robinson’s The Man Against the Sky
in 1916.
127
Arthurian Trilogy appeared as : Merlin in 1917, Lancelot in 1920 ,
and Tristam in 1927, which won Robinson third Pulitzer Prize.
128
The first
Pulitzer Prize was for his Collected Poems in 1924.
129
His works ; The Three
Taverns (1920) , Avon’s Harvest (1921) , Roman Bartholow (1923) , Dionysius
in Doubt (1925) , Sonnets : 1889-1927 (1928) , Cavender’s House (1929) , The
Glory of the Nightingale (1930) , Matthias at the Door (1931) , Nicodemus
13
(1932) , Talifer (1933) , Amaranth (1934) , and King Jasper (1935) , were
published consequently.
130
Robinson received two honorary Litt. Doctoral degrees from Yale and
Bowdoin Universities in 1922 , 1925 respectively.
131
In 1929, Robinson received
the gold medal from the American Institute of Art and Letters for his whole
works of poetry.
132
He hadn’t delivered any lecture or shown any public reading
of his poetry , and never travelled abroad except one time to England in April-
July 1923.
133
He died of cancer 6 April 1935, shortly after he had finished the
last proofreading of his last work King Jasper.
134
14
I.2 LITERATURE REVIEW
This thesis depends on Charles T. Davis E. A. Robinson: Selected Early
Poems and Letters for the poetic texts in Robinson’s early works The Children
of the Night, and Captain Craig. Davis’ introduction is about Robinson’s art
and a hint on his narrative technique. Morton Dauwen Zabel’s book Selected
Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson chooses the most important poems in
eight works of Robinson: The Children of the Night, Captain Craig, The Town
Down the River, The Man Against the Sky, The Three Taverns, Avon’s
Harvest, Dionysus in Doubt, and Nicodemus. The introduction “ E. A.
Robinson: The Many Truths” which accompanies this book is written by James
Dickey. He writes his ideas about Robinson’s poetry and he concentrates on his
poems: “Claverly’s”, “The Man Against the Sky”, and “Issac and Archibald”.
The most important study is Wallace L. Anderson’s E. A. Robinson: A critical
Introduction. The study presents the New England background of Robinson’s
poetry. It presents the early life of Robinson and the main influences on his
poetry. It contains a deep survey of Robinson’s short and medium texts. It gives
also rapid hints on Robinson’s Arthurian Trilogy as long as it relates to the
poet’s art. Francis Murphy edited some essays of many critics in his book E. A.
Robinson: A Collection of Critical Essays including his introduction. The other
essays in the book are: Yvor Winters’ “ A Cool Master” and “ The Shorter
Poems”; Conrad Aiken’s “Three Reviews”; Zabel’s “Robinson in America”;
Frost’s “Introduction to King Jasper”; Coxe’s “ The Lost Tradition”; Dickey’s
“The Many Truth”; Fussell’s “One Kind of Traditional Poet”, Josephine Miles’
“ Inner Fire”; Warner Berthoff’s “The ‘New’ Poetry : Robinson and Frost”; W.
R. Robinson’s “The Alienated Self”; Hyatt Waggoner’s “ The Cosmic Chill”;
and J. C. Levenson’s “Robinson’s Modernity”. These essays demonstrate many
aspects of Robinson’s art and life. The main problem is tradition and modernism
in Robinson’s poetry and the controversial new poetry. Coxe analyses many of
Robinson’s shorter poems especially “Eros Turannos” and “ The Gift of God”.
15
Levenson gives an important hint on Robinson’s omniscient narration which is
constituted the main topic of this thesis. In his book, The Modern Poets: A
Critical Introduction, M. L. Rosenthal deals in a part of a chapter with
Robinson’s famous short poems. Roy Harvey Pearce wrote about Robinson’s
two important poems “Flammonde”, “Eros Turannos” and about new poetry in
his book The Continuity of American Poetry. There is a condensed page
devoted for Robinson in Van Wyck Brooks’ book Our Literary Heritage. In this
page, Brooks Summarizes New England’s influence on Robinson in few lines.
Some numbers of the American literary periodical The Explicator in the 1940s
and 1950s, are very important for interpreting many of Robinson’s short poems
though they include opinions out of date. In a number of the American
Literature, 1966, there is an article of Scott Donaldson “ The Alien Pity: A
Study of Character in E. A. Robinson’s Poetry”, presents some ideas about
Robinson’s narrative method and character presentation especially the related
theme of success in failure and failure in success.
The published letters from Robinson to his friend Harry De Forest Smith,
which were collected under the title The Untraingulated Stars, are a good
material to study Robinson’s life and art. Also, there are the unpublished letters
between Robinson and his friends: Harriet Monroe and W. V. Moody. The
Arthurian Trilogy Merlin, Lancelot, and Tristram are important to study
Robinson’s long narrative technique.
The most important complementary sources in narration and dramatic
poetry are: Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse, Robert Scholes & Robert
Kellog’s The Nature of Narrative, Wallace Martin’s Recent Theories of
Narrative and H. H. Anniah Gowda’s Dramatic Poetry. Rod W. Horton’s
Backgrounds of American Literary Thought and Louise Bogan’s Achievement
in American Poetry 1900-1950 furnish the American literary atmosphere and
the literary history of America within the period of Robinson and prior or
posterior of that period. Some important encyclopaedias and internet
information are widely used in this work.
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