Edwin Arlington Robinson's First Professional Publications

One of the most glaring lacunae in the career of Edwin Arlington Robinson, the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, is the lost apprenticeship fiction he wrote in 1893–94. As Scott Donaldson explains in his recent biography, Robinson at the age of twenty-three "discovered he could write a 4,000-word piece in a week's time" and hoped "to publish a volume of stories" after his two years as a special student at Harvard. He completed seven tales between the summer of 1893 and March 1894 and submitted three to the Atlantic Monthly, whose editor rejected them. Robinson failed to place any of these stories and, bitterly disappointed, in fall 1895 "he destroyed the manuscript that had been his major project for the two previous years." Donaldson ruefully concludes that "One can hardly judge Robinson's early fiction without access" to it.¹ As it happens, however, he published two stories, hitherto lost to scholarship, under the name "E. A. Robinson"² in the New York Ledger in mid-1893. They are his earliest known publications apart from a few poems that had appeared in a Harvard literary magazine.

Founded by Robert Bonner in 1855, the middlebrow Ledger earned a reputation over the years for its generosity toward contributors, including Fanny Fern, Charles Dickens, Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. After Bonner retired in 1887, the storypaper slowly began to decline in popularity, though it still sold between fifty and a hundred thousand copies per week in 1893.³ Robinson likely received around forty dollars for each of the stories—the first publications for which he was paid. Indeed, he would not earn another penny by his pen for nearly six years.

Appearing in May and June 1893, "Madge" and "Chased by a Search Light" hardly transcend all sentimental and sensational conventions, though they are far superior to the pulp fiction Robinson read in adolescence.⁴ Set during the Civil War, they are both narrated by an officer in the Union navy named Harry. The first story, which consists of four short chapters loosely structured around a series of coincidences, opens in Boston in June 1863 as Harry and his friend Jack Ramsey meet Jack's fiancé and her sister Madge. In the second chapter, set in December 1864, Harry mentions the battles he has witnessed as an officer aboard the supply and transport ship Wilderness, including the seizure of Confederate ships during the blockade of Wilmington, North Carolina. Quite by chance, he also meets Madge's fiancé Steve on board the ship. In chapter III, set in 1867, Harry again encounters Steve by chance on the streets of Boston. He and Madge, who regards such happenstance the "queerest chain of events I ever heard of," have married and named their firstborn son Harry after their mutual friend. The final chapter, set in New Orleans twenty-eight years after the first chapter, closes the circle of weird coincidences. Harry meets Steve and Madge's nephew—her sister had married Harry's friend John Ramsey—aboard the Wilderness just before it is sold for scrap. The tale ends on a note Robinson would strike throughout his career in such poems as "Luke Havergal" and "The Man Against the Sky": "of a truth, man is indeed the sport of circumstances and, like the leaf caught up by the wind, is whirled whithersoever it wills."⁵

The second story, consisting of a single episode, is narrated in flashback. Harry reminisces about a harrowing night aboard the Wilderness during the blockade of Wilmington in fall 1864. As Donaldson avers, "Always hovering on the edge of [Robinson's] consciousness . . . was the tremendous fact of the sea."⁶ Raised in a coastal town in Maine, he often wrote poetry about the sea, as in "Ballade of a Ship" and "Lost Anchors," and even in this early story he portrayed the ocean scene with a naturalistic flourish worthy of Stephen Crane:

The bleakness in the aspect of the heavens, the ashen hue of the zenith, which reflected a cold, unearthly light, and the long, clear ruling of the sea-line in the...