Robinson and the Democracy of Form

Edwin Arlington Robinson

         There are, and always have been, two kinds of poetry in the world: "religious poetry" and "art poetry." Sometimes religious poetry is written by secular poets who think of themselves not as churchmen or priests, but as prophets or shamans ¾ Walt Whitman is an example, for he believed that he spoke for the common man and was therefore the great "democratic poet." "Art poetry" is written by people who love the language and what it can do to the ear and the heart; it is literary poetry, and it is usually disdained by religious people as being inutile¾that is, not useful as a means to salvation or an expression of worship; it is “elitist,” written for “unmanly” purposes by unmanly people, as Whitman liked to allege.

         The paradox is that it is art poetry, not priest poetry, that is accessible to most readers, because it is written for all the literate, not merely a caste of shamans and priests. It uses inclusive, not exclusive techniques. Edwin Arlington Robinson was a formalist and an art poet who did, in fact, think of himself as a literary man — one who is set apart from the masses of the illiterate, the unliterate, or the aliterate. But he wrote about ordinary people, and ordinary people can understand him; they still love to read him because he makes the language dance in their ears and teaches them something about themselves and the condition of being human.

         Until 1912, when Harriet Monroe was about to found her magazine called Poetry in Chicago, thereby giving Ezra Pound and the cultural movement that has come to be called Modernism, for want of a better term, their first major forum in the United States, American poetry had been, according to its Transcendentalist critics, "imitative and derivative," a sub-branch of British poetry for two and a half centuries. Although a few American literati had been kicking against the English traces, ever since William Cullen Bryant, the so-called "Father of American poetry," most had been unable to break away from traditional rhyme and meter in practice, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, the "agonist" or theoretical spokesman for a new American poetics. Most of the trouble seemed to be technical: American poets had difficulty getting personal voices out of the old forms. Emerson prescribed a remedy: invent new forms; cast off the burden of tradition and allow American poets and poems to grow naturally, like plants; operate through intuition in order to attain Vision, which is poetry's core, and the form will follow "organically."

         If Whitman took the medicine, no one else did in Victorian America — but suddenly, at the turn of the twentieth century, there didn't seem to be a problem for three American poets who continued to write in the old forms. Edwin Arlington Robinson began to emerge from the shadows; Robert Frost published a few poems in periodicals; and Ezra Pound himself issued A Lume Spento in Venice in 1908 — "A collection of stale creampuffs," he was to call it in 1964.

         Perhaps it was, but Pound early on in his career was gamboling about in medieval Provençal verse forms like a dolphin in its native element. Not many years later E. E. Cummings could be so confident of sonnets that he would disguise them by means of grammatical dispersion, and he would be considered an extreme Modernist by baffled traditionalists, rather than the sentimental romantic he actually was. At the Library of Congress' National Poetry Festival in 1962 Langston Hughes, talking about his early years as a professional poet, could even assign pecuniary motives to this kind of confident, cavalier treatment of verse: "Well, 1 learned long ago," he said, — "and I tell you young people this, many of you are going to be poets and hope to sell your poetry — I learned long ago to take a four-line poem and cut each line in half and make it eight. You get a little more," he noted, for verse ordinarily sold to the better magazines in those days at 50 cents per line. It was also Langston Hughes who codified and established as a literary form the native American blues poem.

         How did it suddenly happen that, after such a long period of imitation that Americans could become master technicians who were also fine poets? It wasn't because form itself was so difficult to master, though it is difficult enough, of course — many American poets from Anne Bradstreet on had been adequate technicians; it was because Robinson, Frost, Pound, and others had been able to relieve themselves of the burden of tradition associated with formal poetry, but without discarding the forms themselves.

         Quietly, without exemplar or agonist, American poets in the bardic tradition, such as Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, had been perfecting their craftsmanship, their visions of reality, their personal voices, and there they were in the pre-World War I years, writing beautifully and easily. Alfred Kreymborg said in his history of American poetry, Our Singing Strength, that "The Robinsonian ear is faultless. . . . Rarely, if ever does he break the rules, the so-called laws of versification. He accepts the white or black pieces like a chess-expert, and having concluded one game, takes the opposite side of the board and starts another. There is no element of luck in chess, no such element in the poet."

         Kreymborg was a perceptive early critic of Robinson's work. He continued his remarks by saying that Robinson's "work is compact neither of light nor of darkness, but of light and darkness, and of other supposed antitheses of the human mind: faith and skepticism, tragedy and comedy. He sees each part in relation to the whole, and is therefore the first of American tragi-comedians. A tragi-comedian is the subtlest and most difficult of men to comprehend, and the haze which greeted Robinson was due to the continued immaturity of the American mind." (Our Singing Strength, pp. 297 ff.)

         If the American reading public had difficulty in understanding the moves over the black and white squares on the psychic chessboard, it is nevertheless especially in this balance that the bards of America found what they conceived of as the heart of America. Robert Frost said in a letter to Lawrance Thompson, "Emerson's defect was that he was born of the great tradition of monists. He could see the 'good of evil born,' but he couldn't bring himself to say the evil of good born." Nor could his followers, including Whitman. That is precisely the difference between the bards and the visionaries. America's art poets had for two centuries been trying to enunciate the dance of death and darkness in the midst of blazing light. Robinson did it in the strictest verse forms.

         The Italian sonnet was one of Robinson's favorite traditional forms, and many of the poems in his putative "Tilbury Town" series are Italian sonnets, often with variations in the sestet — that is to say, he allowed himself other rhyme patterns besides the Italian and Sicilian sestets. However, "Fleming Helphenstein" has an Italian sestet. I used the word "putative" because Robinson never wrote a book called Tilbury Town. Such a book was published a long while after his death, but the poet himself never got the volume together. Nevertheless, Robinson's "Tilbury Town,," which in fact is Gardiner, Maine, was filled with people such as Fleming Helphenstein, people whom we might think we know if we pass them on the street, or who, alternatively, think they know us until they take a good look and realize they've made a mistake:

 

At first I thought there was a superfine

Persuasion in his face; but the free glow

That filled it when he stopped and cried, "Hollo!"

Shone joyously, and so I let it shine.

He said his name was Fleming Helphenstine,

But be that as it may; — I only know

He talked of this and that and So-and-so,

And laughed and chaffed like any friend of mine.

 

So goes the octave. After the volta, the “turn,” see what happens in the sestet:

 

But soon, with a queer, quick frown, he looked at me,

And I looked hard at him; and there we gazed

In a strained way that made us cringe and wince:

Then, with a wordless clogged apology

That sounded half confused and half amazed,

He dodged, — and I have never seen him since.

 

That sort of thing has happened to all of us.

         The English sonnet is divided into four stanzas, the first three of which are four lines long — that is, quatrains, and the last is two lines long, a couplet. The volta takes place between the last quatrain and the concluding couplet. Since there is far less space for the turn to be developed in this form, the English sonnet tends to be more climactic than the Italian. It may be that, because Robinson's metier was more the psychological than the physical, and he wanted the full six lines of the Italian sonnet to develop the volta. In any case, there are no examples of the English sonnet in the Robinson canon.

         The first Robinson poem with which I fell in love, however, was not a sonnet but a villanelle, "The House on the Hill." The French villanelle has five three-line — that is, triplet — stanzas and a concluding quatrain, but it turns on only two rhymes.  Lines one and three of triplet one are refrains, the first of which reappears as lines six, twelve, and eighteen; the second reappears as lines nine, fifteen or, sometimes, in reverse order.  Every line is the same metrical length. Here is "The House on the Hill":

 

They are all gone away,

         The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

 

Though broken walls and gray

         The winds blow bleak and shrill:

They are all gone away.

 

Nor is there one to-day

         To speak them good or ill:

There is nothing more to say.

 

Why is it then we stray

         Around the sunken sill?

They are all gone away,

 

And our poor fancy-play

         For them is wasted skill:

There is nothing more to say.

 

Here is the concluding quatrain. Note how the two refrain lines come together at the end in reverse order to make the final point:

 

There is run and decay

         In the House on the Hill:

They are all gone away,

There is nothing more to say.

 

         Basically, Robinson was a story-teller. One form of the short story is the character sketch, as in "Fleming Helphenstein," and another is the mood piece, as in "The House on the Hill." A third is the thematic story, sometimes called a "think piece." Robinson's "Ballade of Broken Flutes" is such a narrative, cast into the form of a French ballade, a more rigorously set form than the ballad, which may be defined as simply a relatively short lyrical verse narrative — that is, a story meant to be sung. The French ballade has three stanzas are that are octaves with a particular rhyme scheme and the concluding envoy ¾a half-stanza:

 

In dreams I crossed a barren land,

         A land of ruin, far away;

Around me hung on every hand

         A deathful stillness of decay;

         And silent, as in bleak dismay

That song should thus forsaken be,

         On that forgotten ground there lay

The broken flutes of Arcady.

 

         Let me pause here for a moment to explain some of the words Robinson is using, or going to use, in this poem. Bucolics are poems that are intended to contrast simple modes with complex modes of life.  Specifically, the subject matter of bucolics concerns the exaltation of the natural over the cultivated person, and of the country and rustic life over the life of the town and city. This poem is a contrast between the sort of life Robinson led as a child in the more-or-less rural precincts of coastal Maine and the life he later led in more populated areas.

         Bucolics are essentially romantic in content and viewpoint, often set in Arcadia or Arcady, an idealized rural locale, after an idyllic and fabled region of ancient Greece, for bucolics have had a place in literature of the western world from classic times to the present.  The speeches of characters in such poems, or the language of such poems themselves, is sometimes Doric, after a province of ancient Greece, meaning "simple" or "unaffected." Try to imagine this poem being spoken in the accent of old Maine:

 

The forest that was all so grand

         When pipes and tabors had their sway

Stood leafless now, a ghostly band

         Of skeletons in cold array.

         A lonely surge of ancient spray

Told of an unforgetful sea,

         But iron blows had hushed for aye

The broken flutes of Arcady.

 

No more by summer breezes fanned,

         The place was desolate and gray;

But still my dream was to command

         New life into that shrunken clay.

         I tried it. And you scan to-day,

With uncommiserating glee,

         The songs of one who strove to play

The broken flutes of Arcady.

 

         Here is the envoy, which Robinson uses to develop a volta in much the same way that he did in his Italian sonnets. His attempt to sing the simple tunes of classical Arcady, the poet feels, has been unsuccessful, at least insofar as his readers are concerned. One cannot resurrect the past. The word "Rock" in the first line of the envoy is capitalized. In the earlier part of the poem Robinson has been talking about the clay from which the flutes of Arcady were made; they lie now shattered upon the ground. The modern poet cannot blow new life into and through them. They are now mere "rock," and he must forsake them and go to make a living wherever "Mammon," the Greek god of money, may direct him to go:

 

So, Rock, I join the common fray,

         To fight where Mammon may decree;

And leave, to crumble as they may,

         The broken flutes of Arcady.

 

         As he grew older, Robinson more and more turned from writing shorter to longer narratives. In effect, he became the poetic equivalent of a novelist, where before he had been a short story writer. This tendency may be seen in several relatively short poems that point the way towards the longer forms, and one that also illustrates Robinson's use of the second tradition of formal poetry, the nonce form, is "Mr. Flood's Party." The first thing one needs to note about this poem is that Mr. Flood's full name, "Eben Flood," is both the name of a resident of Tilbury Town, and a pun on the tides "ebb and flood," for that is the way that all lives run if they are of any length. Eben's tide is currently at ebb, and unlikely ever to flood again.

         The next thing to notice is that the poem is not written in a particular traditional form, though it is written in iambic pentameter octaves which are technically "heroic octaves" because anything written in the English heroic line, iambic pentameter, is a "heroic" form (sonnets are heroic forms). Robinson's octaves in this poem use a simple and often-used rhyme scheme, though it is not generally or necessarily associated with iambic pentameter verse. In effect, then, Robinson here mixes traditional elements to come up with his own stanza form:

 

MR. FLOOD'S PARTY

 

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night

Over the hill between the town below

And the forsaken upland hermitage

That held as much as he should ever know

On earth again of home, paused warily.

The road was his with not a native near;

And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,

For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:

 

"Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon

Again, and we may not have many more;

The bird is on the wing, the poet says,

And you and I have said it here before.

Drink to the bird." He raised up to the light

The jug that he had gone so far to fill,

And answered huskily: "Well, 'Mr. Flood,

Since you propose it, I believe I will."

 

Alone, as if enduring to the end

A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,

He stood there in the middle of the road

Like Roland's ghost winding a silent horn.

Below him, in the town among the trees,

Where friends of other days had honored him,

A phantom salutation of the dead

Rang thinly till old Eben's eyes were dim.

 

Then, as mother lays her sleeping child

Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,

He set the jug down slowly at his feet

With trembling care, knowing: that most things break;

And only when assured that on firm earth

It stood, as the uncertain lives of men

Assuredly did not, he paced away,

And with his hand extended paused again:

 

"Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this

In a long time; and many a change has come

To both of us, I fear, since last it was

We had a drop together. Welcome home"

Convivially returning with himself,

Again he raised the jug up to the light;

And with an acquiescent quaver said:

"Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might.

 

"Only a very little, Mr. Flood—

For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do"

So, for the time, apparently it did,

And Eben evidently thought so too;

For soon amid the silver loneliness

Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,

Secure, with only two moons listening,

Until the whole harmonious landscape rang—

 

"For auld lang syne." The weary throat gave out,

The last word wavered, and the song was done.

He raised again the jug regretfully

And shook his head, and was again alone.

There was not much that was ahead of him,

And there was nothing in the town below—

Where strangers would have shut the many doors

That many friends had opened long ago.

 

         Robinson wrote metrical poems; I don't believe he ever wrote a so-called "free verse" poem in his life. I say so-called because the phrase is a contradiction in terms. If the dictionaries define verse as "metered language," and prose as "unmetered language," and they do, then one cannot have verse that is free or prose that is metered. "Free verse" is merely a euphemism for prose. Many of the Modernist poets wrote prose poems, but the closest Robinson ever came was to write in the form called "fourteeners." A fourteener  or septenary is a line of iambic heptameter verse with a central caesura — that is, a pause — taking place somewhere after the third foot, usually after the fourth foot. The effect of fourteeners can be prosy, but in the case of this poem, titled "Leonora," it is not. Robinson has a variation in the length of the second line of the first of three quatrain stanzas — it is shorter than the others, twelve syllables rather than fourteen. In fact, nearly all the lines are variants, for most of them begin with an anapest instead of an iamb, thus making them "fifteeners," more or less:

 

They have made for Leonora this low dwelling in the ground,

And with cedar they have woven the four walls round.

Like a little dryad hiding she'll be wrapped all in green,

Better kept and longer valued than by ways that would have been.

 

They will come with many roses in the early afternoon,

They will come with pinks and lilies and with Leonora soon;

And as long as beauty's garments over beauty's limbs are thrown,

There'll be lilies that are liars, and the rose will have its own.

 

There will be a wondrous quiet in the house that they have made,

And to-night will be a darkness in the place where she'll be laid;

But the builders, looking forward into time, could only see

Darker nights for Leonora than to-night shall ever be.

 

Clearly, in the case of Leonora, a continued life of illness would have been worse, in the opinion of the people who built her coffin and buried her, worse than this simple death and burial.

         We have merely scratched the surface of Edwin Arlington Robinson's body of work, but we can say at this point that it is all of a piece: it is traditional at the same time that it is idiosyncratic — no one who knows American poetry would mistake Robinson's poetry for anyone else's, not even for that of Robert Frost, his contemporary and fellow traditionalist. It is a poetry of psychological depth, and it is narrative poetry very largely, but with a strong lyrical base. Robinson knew how to sing the sad stories of the human race so that the ear is ravished and willing to listen to them.

 

“Robinson and the Democracy of Form” was published originally in The Sewanee Review, CXIV:4, Fall 2006, pp. 587-594, copyright 2006, 2012 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.