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Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life

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I've been reading three big jumbo biographies of literary figures all at the same time, this one and the new lives of William Empson and Kingsley Amis (the Amis one comes out in April), and this book, A POET'S LIFE, is the one I figured ahead of time I'd like the least. I went into it scoffing, but came out, if not a convert to Arlington Robinson, a convert to Scott Donaldson, who took a chance with this enigmatic figure and at least squeezed the scrotum of the sphinx hard enough to make him give up a few of his secrets.

Robinson's youth was joyful, his family close, but a series of interrelated family tragedies scarred his adolescence and delivered him into manhood an emotional wreck on many levels. Donaldson provides a table of these tragedies, that's the only possible way to keep them straight, but it's the cumulative effect that matters: when Mary died, the mother of the three boys, her diphtheria kept away every townsperson. "No one would come near Mary Robinson's body or set foot inside the house where she had died." The boys had to prepare her for burial themselves. Even the preacher kept a handkerchief over his face, and avoided facing the grave as he spoke. "It was snowing. There were no other mourners in attendance. During the funeral, one kind neighbor took the risk of hanging a bag of doughnuts on the front doorknob of the Robinson house." Shortly afterwards, Edwin lost his two beloved brothers to addictions, and he himself became a poet--as Donaldson theorizes, an addiction like any other. Gardiner, Maine, was on the verge of a drastic reduction in status, as a city, as a trading center, as a place on the map. Its mills and factories shortly to close. Robinson looked back a thousand times in his poetry, but in life he only rarely returned to the place of his shame, even though his closest relations still clung to their bourgeois gentility.

For himself, the life of a poet entailed living in Boston and New York, and the artists' colony of McDowell, where he became the elder statesman. On his emotional life Donaldson is especially interesting. Robinson never married, and it is sometimes thought that he cherished a lifelong crush on the girl his doctor brother, Herman, married: Emma. I'm not so convinced, but Donaldson makes a good story out of it, pointing out that Robinson's numerous booklength poems frequently tell the same story, a woman who should have married a sensitive man, winding up with his prosperous counterpart, sometimes a brother.

Success came late. He compared his poetry to "rat poison to editors." For eleven years in a row no US magazine paid a penny for any of his contributions. He came of age in the same era as a few other now forgotten poets, (William Vaughan Moody and Ridgely Torrance for example); of them all today only Robert Frost is as read as Robinson. (Indeed many place him in a much higher rank.) In A POET'S LIFE, Frost comes across as a selfish, conniving d--k, but that's no surprise, is it? However, Robinson's aborted Harvard career did eventually plow the way for his surprise success--never count out a Harvard man--and Theodore Roosevelt, of all people, made him a star of the first magnitude (for EAR was the tutor of Teddy's son, Kermit, at Harvard, and Kermit felt sorry for him.) TR's review of Robinson's second volume, THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT, remains, Donaldson notes, the only piece of literary criticism ever published by a sitting US president. Can you imagine our president today turning his hand to such a task? Roosevelt found him a sinecured job with the US government, even though he had sworn to forego this corrupt practice, which had been the pleasure of every previous US head of state, finding jobs for one's cronies. Robinson was Roosevelt's poet guy, a badge of class, even of modernism.

Robinson seems never to have gone out on a date with any woman, much less lost his virginity, and his friendships with other men were of such intensity that some have suspected, well, maybe he was having sex with them (or drawn that way at any rate). Any bit of evidence in this direction is immediately retracted by Donaldson. Mowry Saben, upon whose memoir Donaldson relies for a lot of this "evidence," isn't on second thought such a reliable witness, for he might have been bisexual himself. (We hear this a couple of times.) This gets my goat, for why does being bisexual mean that you're automatically untrustworthy? Perhaps the gay or bisexual would be more eager to ascribe their own condition to any prominent friend. I think it's the other way around, and Donaldson plays up the EAR-Emma "love affair" on evidence no less vague than Saben's, never adding the disclaimer, "However, Witness X was a known heterosexual and may be prejudiced in that direction." All I can say is, that Robinson seems to have left little old Maine for good reason, and he invariably turned up in homosexual hotbeds of the period, Manhattan's Greenwich Village and Chelsea, the back hills of Boston, and the McDowell Colony, where the boys are, EAR was there. And yet we get this sort of thing, again and again: "Only Mowry Saben among those who knew Robinson well, was moved to speculate that he had repressed homoerotic tendencies. And Saben, as we shall see, was an enthusiastic supporter of live and license in all their forms." (Page 261.) WTF, Scott Donaldson?

He was a tenant of Jimmie Moore's in NYC, the sybaritic gamesman who made his apartment building a Xanadu of fun and pleasure (even installing a bowling alley in the basement). Moore was the black sheep grandson of the divine Clement Clarke Moore, the one who gave us "Twas the Night Before Christmas." I think, if you've got the stamina to read this massive book, that you'll fall in love with the poet you meet in these generous and wise pages. And much of his poetry, which Donaldson quotes very aptly, rewards new attention, even a hundred years later. You get to know now only EAR, but the bohemians and Mandarins of a whole vanished culture--hundreds of them, from Amy Lowell and Algernon Blackwood to such "outsider artists" as Franklin Schenck," the painter--a student of Eakins--whom Robinson called the "modern St. Francis," who lived on an island outside East Northport, Long Island, on a "handkerchief of land." The "doctors told him he needed iron," writes Donaldson, "so he was boiling out an old horseshoe in a pot on his one-burner stove. He lacked the money to buy canvas, so he had painted birds and flowers and running streams on every window shade in his shack."

Review of Donaldson, Scott, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life



This book is important partly because it is the first biography in 40 years of the early twentieth-century's most renowned American poet. Thoroughly researched by an experienced biographer, Prof. Scott Donaldson (e.g., Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever), it provides a comprehensive account of EAR's life, as well as brief discussions of many of his best poems, composed between the 1890s and his death in 1935. Donaldson has the advantage of Robinson letters not available to earlier writers; other resources include critical works into this century and his own literary background. The book may provoke further discussion on the topic of love and may present more personal detail than many readers want or need, yet it also allows for a deeper sense of both the man and the poet. It can fill gaps and/or be a refresher for scholars and teachers. Students might peruse the volume for understanding and perhaps the inspiration to read Robinson further. The extensive bibliography is valuable. I recommend this biography and suggest it as a catalyst (along with Donald Hall's and other recent critical works) for restoring E. A. Robinson to his place as one of America's greatest men of letters.

Winifred H. Sullivan, Ph.D.



195 words

Who'd guess a biography of a shy poet from Maine would be such a page-turner? But the story of Robinson kept me riveted. A mother who didn't bother to name him right away since she wanted a girl, a father who considered him a loser, one brother addicted to morphine, another (the father's favorite) who's a raging alcoholic and incidentally stole the first girl Robinson loved. As a poet, he initially suffered financially and commercially for his beliefs as he was the first to write about common people, the gritty and the ordinary, something I never knew. His best-known poem, "Richard Cory," is no longer my only favorite since I've read Dear Friends, House on the Hill and Sheaves. The book's author, Scott Donaldson, apparently had the fortune of using previously unavailable sources, and he really makes Robinson come to life as person and a poet.

This is a fabulous biography of a now all to unfamiliar American Poet. Other than Richard Corey, name one Robinson poem!? I bought this on a whim, and couldn't put it down. Robinson's life, starting in Gardiner, Maine (where he is now seen as a hero, despite his start there being seen as a pathetic failure and embarrassment) and culminating in New York, offers a compelling story of an artist who sacrificed almost everything to remain true to his art. Donaldson does a wonderful job of bringing Robinson to life, and one cannot read this book without coming away with a new found respect for the artist and his poetry. Beware though, you will end up buying many of his poetry books too!