Character in Verse

...Go to the western gate, Luke HavergalLuke Havergal...

...The ears are soothed rather than alerted...

...Still, a new edition of his selected poetry is welcome...

...the poem becomes a sketchy social or political essay...

...But that shows that comparisons are otiose...

...This is most apparent in the short poems on individual personalities, especially those dealing with the Calverly characters from The Town Down the River...

...This is not one man exclaiming to the world and thereby revealing himself...

...That's all on earth we know or ever need to know of Mr...

...His classical versifying, like the Old French Villanelle form, is self-awakening and memorable: Since Persia jell at Marathon, The yellow years have gathered fast: Long centuries have come and gone...

...people become spirits, and the thing-atlarge is the thing conceived...

...In these poems, each character hangs by the thread of the poet's judgment...

...I say no more for Clavering Than I should say of him who fails To bring his wounded vessel home When reft of rudder and of sails...

...Robinson's shortcomings are poetic ones...

...Atherton, Vickery, Lingard, Leffingwell, Aaron Stark, Reuben Bright...

...in narrative poetry, philosophy and character sense must hold their own footing with sound and rhythm...

...Robinson is a poet of sight...

...This is certainly true of "Toussaint L'Ouverture," "Isaac and Archibald, the senseless errings of "The Book of Annandale," "Annandale Again," and many others...

...Secondly, the numbing effect of sound versification detracts from the reader's attention, unless his prose cap is fastened firmly on his head...

...His appreciators - among them, Carl Van Doren, Louis Untermeyer...

...R. P. Blackmur once observed about Robinson's characters that their principle trait "may be presumed to apply to the person indicated, but it does not flow from them nor render them specific...

...But go, and if you listen she will call...

...Robinson tries to catch their walking movement and through verse, to make it characteristic of them...

...Flood, Isaac and Archibald all begin by being people walking in their ordinary fashion...

...In the best of Robinson's character poems, the person seen exists only in the verse...

...The fact that modern poetry has surrendered all its characters to novels and political myth-makers is a good reason to tend to Robinson's successes...

...The verse is alive and necessary...

...Robinson might be mistaken for a difficult poet...

...And yet (they say) the place will don A phantom fury of the past, Since Persia fell at Marathon...

...Verse does not come much better than that...

...The story itself, the narrative, wherever the poem catches the man, becomes part of him, maker and made...

...When he writes of people he does not seeZola, Erasmus, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt-no character emerges at all...

...The verse conceals the character...

...5 Reviewed by EDWARD PELL Poet and critic "I must be a damned fool for to me the stuff [poetry] seems as easy as lying-whatever faults in metrics it may possess" Edwin Arlington Robinson (in a letter, 1911...

...Richard Cory, the Man Against the Sky on Mount Monadnock, Mr...

...One owes an explanation of and to poets one does not like, and an explanation to readers of poets one does like...

...The leaves will whisper there of her, and some, Like flying words, will strike you as they fall...

...Bliss Perry, Edwin Ranck, Lawrence Conrad and Yvor Winters __have always been at hand and tuned in to his work so he has never been in need of dramatic resurrection...

...He likes to give two legs and a face to abstractions...

...that Robinson's observations are "suppositious in character," which leads to "the versification of indifferent materials...

...Toussaint" and "Sainte Nitouche" are examples of this: In one case a man talking about himself in acceptable blank verse but talking much too much, and in the other, the poet taking over the verbosity, and in such a way as to put an evening reader to sleep and inspire a morning reader to glance at his watch...

...Therefore, so is the subject...

...Flood: 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...

...it is personality seen from the outside, created by, dependent upon verse, rhyme and the thrill of moving words...

...This is eye and ear portraiture...

...as in the case of the famous Mr...

...The removal of some of the intelligence by good, long blank verse does not enhance precise motivational understanding...

...But such a criticism is relevant only to those of Robinson's characters who talk themselves right out of good poetry...

...it's not the names we remember, it's the verses: Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal, There where the vines cling crimson on the wall, And in the twilight wait for what will come...

...Robinson never lost the ability to write boring blank verse in which the poetry drives out what must have been the man...

...Where character fails in Robinson is where the verse itself is not fine and close...

...I say no more than I should say Of any other one who sees Too far for guidance of today, Too near for the eternities...

...This fault of good blank versifying operates in two ways that are detrimental to the revelation of character...

...He likes to catch people in his direct line of gaze, to see them sitting, talking, smoking and above all, walking...

...It is only that the poem inhibits the character, whereas in success, it invents him...

...When Oakes in "Two Gardens in Linndale" dies, he is taken by a man: He came to greet them where they were, And he too was a Gardener...

...First, figures of speech or metaphors that catch and please the ear are written down and retained without the character sense giving its full accord...

...That is where the poem catches him...

...of course what is being compared resembles the best when the best is present in it...

...When he fails, it is not due to emotional limitation...

...This is the first general collection of Robinson's poetry to appear since Macmillan's publication of the third edition of "Collected Poems" in 1937, two years after the poet's death...

...In poems like "Annandale," "Rembrandt to Rembrandt," and "Mortmain," one thinks Robinson must have known more about his characters than the poem reveals, or he would not have had the will power to keep pen to paper or seat to chair...

...But since well before 1917, when Amy Lowell wrote her long appreciation of Robinson in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, he has been a generally well accepted poet...

...in his short poems, because of a general vocabulary used for specific ends, and in the long ones, because of a difficulty that springs from boredom...

...One enjoys reading much of it, and for the demanding poetry reader it raises questions as to the effects of poetic conventions on human character not often raised by those who write poetry today...

...He was on his way...

...This is character conveyed by verse, with the author-hauntingly to our scientific spirits - standing aside as maker...

...Robinson is also a personifying poet...

...Then the poet himself is removed, the workman is not revealed until the work itself casts its shadow on the page beside him...

...He stood between these gentle men, He stayed a little while, and then The land was all for Oliver...

...The way character gets into Robinson's poetry is a sign of how good he really is...

...Sometimes in a very unthorough fashion, Robinson slams the personification process into reverse...

...His verse, however, is always becoming a character...

...In everything Robinson sounds as if there is someone else better: Hardy, Browning, Frost or Masters...

...Robinson is best when he sees or knows a character directly...

...maybe he didn't make it home that night...

...Eben Flood drunk, alone at night on the hill above Tilbury Town...

...For A Dead Lady" is an example of this, and in it, character is bleached right out by a poetic failure...