Selected Poems (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) [Mass Market Paperback]

Edwin Arlington Robinson (Author), Robert Faggen (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin | Publication Date: December 1, 1997

Edwin Arlington Robinson's finely crafted, formal rhythms mirror the tension the poet sees between life's immutable circumstances and humanity's often tragic attempts to exert control. At once dramatic and witty, his poems lay bare the loneliness and despair of life in genteel small towns ("Tilbury Down" and "The Mill"), the tyranny of love ("Eros Turrannos" and "The Unforgiven"), and unspoken, unnoticed suffering ("The Wandering Jew", and "Isaac and Archibald"). In addition, the fictional characters he created in "Reuben Bright", "Miniver Cheevy", "Richard Cory", and the historical figures he brought to life -- Lincoln in "The Master" and the great painter in "Rembrandt to Rembrandt" -- harbor demons and passions the world treats with indifference or cruelty. With an Introduction that sheds light on Robinson's influence on poets from Eliot and Pound to Frost and Berryman, this collection brings an unjustly neglected poet to new readers.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (December 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140189882
• ISBN-13: 978-0140189889
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #604,295 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "There was more than sound. . . more than just an axe.", February 13, 2004

By 

Stephen Taylor (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Selected Poems (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

Like fellow New England poet Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson helped limber up traditional, rhymed American verse, steering it away from the stilted and bombastic norms of the 19th century while also avoiding free verse. More importantly, Robinson wrote about "the other half" -- drunks, dreamers, women-chasers, narcissistic suicides, jettisoned lover-boys, devastated widows, brutal misers. By doing so, he paved the way for the modernist obsesssion with the "common man". (In fact, he is still best known for his biting characterizations of Luke Havergal, Richard Cory, and Cliff Klingenhagen). A tense but satirical electricity runs through all of his work. As Frost said, "Robinson's theme was unhappiness itself, but his skill was as happy as it was playful... His life was a revel in the felicities of language."

The earlier poetry is predominately concerned with failure and misery, "the withered souls of men", as Robinson put it. (Robinson wrote much this poetry while working as a ticket collector on the New York subway, not long out of Harvard). Men have paid a price for their innocence and are unable, like Zola (whom he praises in a poem) to look squarely at the "compromising chart of hell" they have created. Great democratic mobs judge each others' grief, a grief they can seldom comprehend. Writers worship "the flicker and not the flame". Misery and the passing of things toll like a villanelle in most of Robinson's early work: "There is ruin and decay," "long centuries have come and gone," the world seems to be churning toward the "western gate" of darkness, death's portal.

By contrast, the more mature Robinson is more interested in light and voices and spiritual illumination. He sees great value in our intellectual and spiritual struggles, our so-called "modern" ideas, even though they may be "some day be quaint as any [tale] told / In almagest or chronicle of old." The older Robinson does not fight against the ultimately unknowable realities. He is not a disjointed Romantic raging against the misnamed "encroachments" of time. He is glad that reality remains a mystery in the end, a great and indecipherable code of silent stars and sheaves of girl-like, golden wheat that speak love in their very silence. The world, like true poetry, has "a mighty meaning of a kind / That tells the more the more it is not told."

I bought this book several years ago in Malta during a bout of homesickness and it has been blowing my mind ever since. Check it out!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The poet of hard reality, January 17, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Selected Poems (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

I first read the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson in school. They were quite surprising then and somewhat menacing. For they told of things happening to people which were not supposed to happen to them. They told of great unhappiness, often disguised. "Miniver Cheevy child of scorn, cursed the day that he was born" And Miniver of course lived for the great past which never was. Another of these characters the imperially correct Richard Cory " went home one day and put a bullet in his head."
Robinson is I believe considered best as a poet when he writes these character- stories, and portraits of failure. And this when he had a whole other world of poetic works, including 'romantic poems' on Arthurian times.
He was a rarity in that he considered himself a poet by vocation and dedicated himself wholly to this, despite years of poverty and frustration. He had come from a wealthy family which had in losing its fortune known many personal disasters.
He was in late- career adopted by President Roosevelt who secured him a nice Melville-like customs job where he could better devote himself to writing. He chose 'Poetry' as his life even desisting from family life on the grounds that it might hurt his poetry.
The poetic character sketches which tell life- stories in a few stanzas are still today powerful reading.
In an analysis of his verse David Perkins writes,"If a formula could be given for a typical poem of Robinson, it would include the following elements: characterization; indirect and allusive narration; contemporary setting and recognition of the impingement of setting on individual lives; psychological realism and interest in exploring the tangles of human feelings and relationships; an onlooker or observer as speaker, making the poems impersonal and objective with respect to Robinson himself; a penchant for the humorous point of view combined with an awareness that life is more essentially tragic; a language that is colloquial, sinewy, and subtle as it conveys twists of implication in continually active thinking; a mindfulness of the difficulty of moral judgment but also a concern for it."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fine selection, November 9, 2007

By 

magellan (Santa Clara, CA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Selected Poems (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

Robinson was a creator of trenchant mini-biographies in verse, many of which became instant classics and familiar to every schoolchild, such as "Miniver Cheevy" and "Richard Cory"--which was even referred to in a Simon and Garkunkel song in their landmark Bookends album. Sadly, such education seems to have vanished from our schools and the experience of generation X'ers in favor of MTV and video games, and their mental development is the poorer for it. But Robinson's gifts for insightful and penetrating observations of people's character, and his unique poetic style, which avoided classical norms as well as free verse, was unique and has remained unequalled. Truly a great American of letters who should be better known today. Despite our greater scientific and technological achievements, we live in a more ignorant, barbaric, and less literate age than Robinson did.