"Vanity's Impatient Ear"

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON (162 pp.) --Yvor Winters-- New Directions ($2).

In poetry, as in everything else, reason should be the controlling principle. That is what Professor Yvor Winters of Stanford believes, and with passion. Winters has a sensitiveness to poetic effects that lifts his criticism of the late poet Edwin Arlington Robinson far out of the academic class.

Long before Robinson died in 1935, U.S. readers recognized him as a poet of fine conscience and objective talent; so did readers abroad, for whom Robinson's poetry represented something considerable in U.S. writing. A shy, silent New Englander, the poet spent his last years writing long blank-verse narratives, three of them based, as were Tennyson's Idylls of the King, on Malory's Morte d'Arthur. Subtle and skillful as these were--more so than Tennyson's--they are not, in Critic Winters' opinion, Robinson's best work. He has selected eleven short poems, all written before 1925, which "can be equaled, I think, in the work of only four or five English and American poets of the past century and a half."

Winters admits that in many of Robinson's poems there is a frosty New England eccentricity, "an intellectualism which is clever rather than perceptive, and which reduces his dry rhythm to [a] jingling parlor verse. ..." But Robinson rose above this, he thinks, in stanzas like these in Hillcrest:*

He may, if he but listen well,

Through twilight and the silence here,

Be told what there are none may tell

To "vanity's impatient ear;

And he may never dare again

Say what awaits him, or be sure

What sunlight labyrinth of pain He may not enter and endure.

Who knows today from yesterday

May learn to count no thing too strange:

Love builds of what Time takes away,

Till Death itself is less than Change.

Winters' comparisons of Robinson with other poets are crisp, e.g., "[Thomas] Hardy describes the natural landscape in detail and implies the human tragedy. Robinson analyzes the tragedy and implies the landscape. . . ." The chief fault of this book is that poems are cited, not quoted, and the reader has to have Robinson's Collected Poems beside him to follow the criticism. But that may not be a bad idea.

* Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (Macmillan, 1940).

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