Arts and Letters

One December day in the year 1896 I received through the post a thin paper-covered booklet called The Torrent and the Night Before by Edwin Arlington Robinson. (Gardiner, Maine, 1889-1896.)

On the title-page was printed a disarming ironical quotation from François Coppée—

Qui pourrais-je imiter pour être original?

and at the foot of the title-page, instead of a publisher's name was the statement

PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR ∙ MDCCCXCVI

and across the title-page was written in ink

W. L. Phelps,
with compliments of E. A. Robinson
9 December, 1896

The printed dedication of the tiny volume was humorously modest:

This book is dedicated to any man, woman, or critic who will cut the edges of it.—I have done the top.

I have no recollection of reading this book, and none of acknowledging it; but I must have done both, for the next year (1897) I received a bound volume of 123 pages, called The Children of the Night, A Book of Poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson. (Boston, Richard G. Badger & Company, MDCCCXCVII.)

A publisher's note preceding the title-page said

This first edition of The Children of the Night consists of Five Hundred Copies on Batchworth Laid Paper, and Fifty Copies on Imperial Japanese Vellum

and on the fly-leaf was written in ink

W. L. Phelps
from E. A. Robinson
4 December, 1897

I read every word of this volume, as is proved by a note I made at the end of it, only a few days after I received it.

For more than twenty years these two precious volumes disappeared from my sight; during that interval we moved twice. One day, somewhere in the nineteen-twenties, I found the two resting quietly among a lot of old papers, wholly uninjured by their prolonged slumber.

I mention these facts, because the first of these books is now one of the most valuable to collectors in American Literature, and the second fetches an exalted price; both being autograph copies adds to their value.

I never saw Robinson until Yale gave him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in 1922. I had a good talk with him then. He was quiet, reticent, modest, and produced an impression of absolute sincerity.

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born at Head Tide, Maine, 22 December 1869 and died in New York, 6 April 1935. He was never married. He was three times awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He was elected a member of the Academy on 10 November 1927.

His fiftieth birthday, 22 December 1919, was celebrated all over the United States; one of the very few occasions in the history of our country, when the birthday of a poet had a nation-wide commemoration during his lifetime. It is unnecessary to say that he took no part in it, nor made any public appearance.

The year after his death, 18 October 1936, a tablet to Robinson was unveiled at Gardiner, Maine, in the presence of a large assembly. The exercises were as simple as they were dignified. Hermann Hagedorn called him a beloved figure in the American Pantheon, "the anchorite, outside space and time, conscious of an eternal eye upon him and upon the work of his hands."

This tablet was presented to the city by Henry Richards, husband of Laura E. Richards, author of the little book giving all the information we have of Robinson's childhood and boyhood in Maine.

It is interesting, in view of the facilities for publicity in the twentieth century, that during his entire career Robinson did everything possible to avoid attracting attention. No one could secure a photograph of him or any biographical data from himself; he refused to appear in public, he did not read or discuss his poems before audiences, he remained solitary and inaccessible. Yet he was generally acknowledged as the foremost living American poet; raised to that eminence by the sheer merit of his verse.

When in the year 1928, he was awarded by the National Institute of Arts and Letters the Gold Medal for poetry, he wrote me this characteristic letter:

Dear Phelps,

I am writing to you as President of the Institute of Arts and Letters to express my sincere thanks to all concerned in my receipt of the Gold Medal for Poetry this year. It is certainly a source of great pleasure and satisfaction to me. At the risk of appearing a little ungracious, may I ask if anything in the nature of a formal presentation may be omitted? As I grow older I find myself less inclined, if possible, to indulge in the luxuries of publicity. I am still human, however, and am glad to know that there are several people somewhere who like what I have done, or some of it.

Yours sincerely,

E. A. Robinson.

His statement, "As I grow older I find myself less inclined, if possible, to indulge in the luxuries of publicity," has a humor all its own.

In this same year the Letters of Thomas Sergeant Perry, a truly great scholar, and an intimate friend of both Mr. Robinson and me, were published, with an Introduction by Robinson. I wrote him again about the Medal and about these letters, but I lamented the absence of an index. He replied as follows.

Dear Phelps,

Thank you for your letter of the nineteenth regarding the award of the medal. Your consideration is much appreciated, and you have my gratitude.

Your approval of the Letters and the Introduction gives me great pleasure, as you know. The lack of an index has called down curses on my head, and with reason, as I have to admit.

Yours very sincerely,

E. A. Robinson.

When Robinson began to publish his poetry in the late nineties, the times were not favorable; but the true poet should have genius for the inopportune. These two early volumes attracted very little attention; and apparently they were doomed to speedy and complete oblivion, the inescapable fate of ninety-nine books out of every hundred.

But about fifteen years later, in the revival of poetry in America, Robinson came into his own; and he deserved his fame, both for the excellence of his work and because he was one of the leaders in this renaissance. The dates are significant. The Torrent, 1896; Children of the Night, 1897; Captain Craig, 1902; The Town Down the River, 1910; The Man Against the Sky, 1916; and Merlin, 1917.

His original play, Van Zorn, is not only very fine as drama and as literature but it exhibits a side of his talents usually unknown; it had the bad luck to appear in 1914.

I confess that I made two errors in estimating his work. I thought that when Merlin appeared, he was on the wrong track, that he had better let those legends alone. It seemed to me as if he were trying to dilute Tennyson; and to dilute Tennyson won't do at all. My second error was my belief that the value of Robinson's work was analytical and intellectual rather than emotional. In 1918, I wrote,

It is of course possible that Mr. Robinson wished to try something in a romantic vein; but it is not his vein. He excels in the clear presentment of character; in pith; in sharp outline; in solid, masculine effort.... He is an excellent draughtsman; everything that he has done has beauty of line; anything pretentious is to him abhorrent. He is more map-maker than painter.

Then, to my amazement and delight, he proved me wrong by producing in 1927 his masterpiece, Tristram. It not only is his best poem, it is the best poetic version of that immortal story that has ever appeared in English. It glows with passion and is radiant with beauty. And indeed, perhaps its closing lines about the other Isolde, Isolt of the White Hands, leave on our minds the deepest impression. For here he rises from the particular to the universal.

Isolt of the white hands,
Isolt with her gray eyes and her white face,
Still gazed across the water to the north
But not now for a ship. Were ships to come,
No fleet of them could hold a golden cargo
That would be worth one agate that was hers—
One toy that he had given her long ago,
And long ago forgotten. Yet there she gazed
Across the water, over the white waves,
Upon a castle that she had never seen,
And would not see, save as a phantom shape
Against a phantom sky. He had been there,
She thought, but not with her. He had died there,
But not for her. He had not thought of her,
Perhaps, and that was strange. He had been all,
And would be always all there was for her,
And he had not come back to her alive,
Not even to go again. It was like that
For women, sometimes, and might be so too often
For women like her. She hoped there were not many
Of them, or many of them to be, not knowing
More about that than about waves and foam,
And white birds everywhere, flying, and flying;
Alone, with her white face and her gray eyes,
She watched them there till even her thoughts were white,
And there was nothing alive but white birds flying,
Flying, and always flying, and still flying,
And the white sunlight flashing on the sea.