A Poet with No Life to Speak of

Scott Donaldson has forged an excellent biography of a most unpromising subject—the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, a man who by his own testimony had “no life to speak of, much less to write about.” This is a common enough situation: the activity that makes writers of interest to biographers takes place in private and cannot be captured in words. The lives of some authors are filled with movement and drama (Byron and Hemingway come to mind), but Robinson’s life was essentially static. He spent his adult years writing poetry and doing little else; he neither married nor traveled nor taught nor lectured nor womanized nor feuded. He lived alone, sharing the company of literary people only during the summers, when he worked at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Most of the turmoil in Robinson’s life occurred early, with the disintegration of his family after his father’s death and with his own unrequited love for a woman who eventually married one of his brothers. He attended Harvard, held odd jobs, and endured long periods of poverty and obscurity. In spite of these conditions he was prolific, publishing some twenty volumes of poetry during his lifetime. The poems, however, are not especially self-revelatory; nor did Robinson leave behind published memoirs or the kinds of journals and private papers that biographers mine for insights into personality and character. Thus, when he began this biography, Donaldson was largely on his own.

When he died in 1935 Robinson was the most celebrated poet in America. He had won three Pulitzer Prizes and had managed a near best seller—Tristram, a book-length narrative in verse that had appeared in 1927. An official account of his life was needed, but his first two biographers were impeded by squabbling among his friends and family members. Subsequent scholars were discouraged by the fact that his literary stock went into decline during the 1940s and 50s. Robinson wrote in conventional forms—the sonnet and villanelle and the blank-verse narrative—during a time when Frost, Eliot, Pound, Moore, Stevens, and Cummings were helping to create the language of modernism. Perhaps as a consequence Robinson’s reputation today rests almost entirely on a few anthology pieces, of which “Richard Cory,” “Miniver Cheevy,” and “Mr. Flood’s Party” are the best known.

Donaldson has undertaken to change this situation by giving us the most extensive and revealing account of Robinson’s life yet published. Donaldson is an experienced biographer, and he knows how to go about his business. He has made some extraordinary discoveries, including a partly finished edition of Robinson’s letters that was languishing in a widow’s attic and two unpublished memoirs written by close friends of the poet. Robinson’s papers, preserved at Colby College and at Harvard, yielded much of value; most of the family members had expired by the time Donaldson began his work, and he was not hindered by the kinds of interference that keepers of the flame can sometimes introduce.

Donaldson’s voice comes through strongly in this biography. It is a confident voice, one we trust and to which we willingly give our attention. Donaldson’s respect for Robinson’s achievement shines through on every page. This, together with long quotations from the poetry and accompanying passages of exegesis, accomplishes what every literary biography should: it sends the reader back to the writing, curious to find the same stimulation and pleasure that the biographer has discovered. Robinson’s best poems are short to medium-length psychological portraits, often of common citizens like the ones who interested Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters. Robinson wrote a strong line, relied on internal rhyme and end-rhyme, used the words and rhythms of everyday language, and eschewed typographical or structural tricks. His oeuvre merits interpretation by a new generation of critics, who will now have this splendid biography as a guide.