Already Wide Enough: Edwin Arlington Robinson and the Lives of Others

My son Rache, who is now a few months past 11, has picked up a few privileges of late. For instance, he can now, with a helmet, ride his bike down to the road, around the mailbox on to our neighbor Lee's house, down the field road, and back into our yard. This is probably a three-quarter-mile loop, so he's well outside of my sight and hearing when he's gone. While I, of course, remember cycling to what seemed like destinations on other planets in my 1980s and 1990s childhood, having him off on his own was still a big step for his mom and me. Also, while cars are relatively few and far between out here in the country, those that do come by come by fast, and they aren't expecting kids on bicycles, so there is legitimate cause for caution.

But he's thrilled with his sense of freedom. While there is technically nowhere to "go" out here (unlike in my childhood suburban bikescape), he loves just the open sense of possibility as he rides—the fact of himself in motion. And alone. And maybe that's the crucial part of it. He is with himself out there, and, for now, that is an exhilarating feeling. When he returns from a loop (his term), he is usually out of breath, his long hair helmet-shaped and half sweat-stuck to his face; he often has some small story—he waved at Lee, or he passed the Amish family in their buggy, or he passed one of the Amish children in their miniature buggy (hooked to Starburst, the miniature pony), or Lee's dog Abe chased him down the road, tongue as long as his ears, or he saw a feral kitten that might need rescuing, etc. And when he tells me these stories, I'm always struck by how he is beginning to limn out what life looks like from a singular perspective. Does that make sense? What I mean is that he is beginning to understand that he is stuck inside himself. When he cycled off that first time, beyond our eyes, Kate and I could feel physically the space between him and us increase. Or it made itself increasingly perceptible. Now he is beginning to understand that space as a permanent feature of living, and that that can be a thing that is scary and a thing to be celebrated.

When I think of the spaces between people, one poet comes to mind immediately: Edwin Arlington Robinson. Now, I have written about this space in thinking about Elizabeth Bishop—but Bishop spends her effort on imagining the space, whereas Robinson, one might say, expends his energy on imagining the person on the other side. Robinson is probably one of the most underappreciated American poets of the twentieth century. In ways, he should also be noted as one of our great dramatists and novelists—not because he wrote extensively in those forms but because his poetry at its best is always imagining the lives of others. We generally come to Robinson, if we come to him, through some of his early Tilbury Town poems—poems like "Miniver Cheevy" or "Richard Cory" or "Mr. Flood's Party"—each a small masterpiece of finding the empty spaces in, and stretched out before, others' lives. And while his poems are almost relentlessly dark, we can read him as also pointing ways towards, if not light, a safer spot in the darkness.

When you imagine the life of another person—whether it be fiction or in reality—you are practicing empathy. In our visual world, we are often briefly asked to consider others through photographs—migrants dead in the rushes of the Rio Grande, an Afghan girl's haunted eyes, a poignant selfie. But this kind of quick-grab empathy strikes me as something other than what Robinson is up to. An image does not always allow us a deep dive into the complexities of the other life; it is instead a kind of blunt summary, so blunt...