There’s a new biography and a new Selected Poems for Edwin Arlington Robinson, and they’ve gotten good notice in a few relatively obscure publications—Charles Simic, our new poet laureate, writes in the December 6 New York Review of Books, and David Mason in the Autumn 2007 The Hudson Review (the article itself is not online)—but the wonderful Robert Mezey edited Modern Library edition is out of print (I have it); his long poetry, including best-selling, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Arthurian epics(!) are all but unknown: I don’t remember, from 6 years of graduate study in English poetry, his name being mentioned once.
But poets as different as Mezey, Simic, and Mason all consider Robinson to be a major poet, indeed a great poet. Robert Frost, whose introduction to Robinson’s last book, King Jasper, is included in Mezey’s edition as well as in the Library of America’s Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, writes there that in his first conversation about poetry with another poet—who happened to be Ezra Pound—
I remember the pleasure with which Pound and I laughed over the fourth “thought” in
Miniver thought and thought and thought
And thought about it.
Three “thoughts” would have been “adequate” as the critical praise-word then was. There would have been nothing to complain of had it been left at three. The fourth made the intolerable touch of poetry … There is more to it than the number of the “thoughts.” There is the way the last one turns up by surprise around the corner, the way the shape of the stanza played with, the easy way the obstacle of verse is turned to advantage.
So Pound and Frost, too.
Mezey, Mason, and Simic all relate how Robinson was once rescued from destitution by a sitting president, Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote a glowing review of Robinson’s till-then self-published poetry and secured him a job in the New York Custom house for which he was expected only to make poems. Now, our own Beloved Leader has appointed Dana Gioia chair of the NEA, nearly the only good thing he’s done (and a very good thing, indeed), and Teddy Roosevelt, told by Congress he could not have the money to “show the fleet” by sailing it round the world, sent it half way and told Congress to get it back from there. But when American troops under Roosevelt tortured Filipino resistance fighters, Roosevelt had a general court-martialed, and fired that general when the verdict was only “excessive zeal.“
Just one more New Year’s Eve after tonight with George Bush in office—the Senate Republicans and Lieberman can easily block conviction on any articles of impeachment the House might in a better world have the courage to send them—and then maybe we can put a fork in him and Cheney. They’re already done.
And Robinson’s Collected is back in print.
7:33:50 PM 
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