Collected Poems

TWO years ago Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson reached his fiftieth birthday. On that occasion he was publicly
greeted by nearly every poet of any distinction in America as the master of them all. Enlightened criticism in that country has for long recognised him as having more clearly the qualities of permanence, perhaps, than any other American
now writing. Even a poet so unlike Mr. Robinson himself in
aim and method as Miss Amy Lowell devoted a long chapter
in her book on Tendencies in American Poetry to the work of
one whose distinction she finely acknowledges. A new book
by Mr. Robinson has in America, among the austere critics at
least, as much importance, shall we say, as a new book by Mr.
Yeats has to those in this country. And yet, with all this, there
is, I suppose, no poet of anything like his excellence in America
who is there so little known as more than a name, while in this
country at present he can hardly be said even to be a name. I
do not think that any of his books are to be found in an English
publisher's list, and in reviewing a recently issued anthology
of contemporary American verse, at the length of two columns,
the Times Literary Supplement passed him by without reference, while the Nation and Athenceum, with even less excuse,
since in that case it could not be merely an oversight, spoke
of him only to dismiss him in two or three lines as being duller
than Wordsworth at his dullest. A third writer, in the Saturday
Review, can only say that his " compositions are to a strange
degree " like those of Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. Sandburg. It
would be as intelligent to say that the poems of Edgar Allan
Poe are like those of Walt Whitman. Ignorance is all very well,
and even rather charming in its place, but when it begins to
commit absurdities of this kind something ought to be done
about it. A critic who discusses contemporary American poetry .and thinks that Mr. Robinson is either not worth mentioning at all or only to be mentioned with contempt, or that his poetry
is like Mr. Sandburg's, simply does not know his business and ought to change it for another.