![]() For a man with no life, Robinson, Robinson the phenomenon, proves to be quite complicated. ![]() Donaldson has achieved a more complete reconstruction of the poet’s personal circumstances than has yet been possible, and in tactfully overlaying this reconstruction with criticism of the poems he arrives at a case study of a major artist that is fascinating far in excess of the facts. There is also the considerable inspiration of Robinson’s almost jarring wholesomeness as a man, which so far emerges more clearly the more material comes to light. The bulk of Robinson’s correspondence has recently been transcribed (no mean feat, given his handwriting), and two unpublished remembrances by the poet’s friends have recently surfaced. Robert Mezey, in the introduction to his 1999 selection of Robinson’s poems, despaired of explaining it: “No one yet has been able to give a wholly accurate account of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s life, or convey a persuasively vivid sense of the sort of man he was it may not be possible.” It has at some length proved possible, with a few factors working in Scott Donaldson’s favor. The gulf between the outward psychological intensity of the work and the inward silence of the writer (in accounts of the poet, every third word is “reticent”) has left a stubborn enigma. Already in this early sonnet he embraces a self-obliterating approach to literature, an approach he will seldom state this baldly but will never really alter. Robinson would not have liked to be written about. ![]() Let the man go: let the dead flesh be dead,Į. 553 pp., $34.95.Įdwin Arlington Robinson: Poems, selected and edited by Scott Donaldson. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life, by Scott Donaldson.
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