Just like Philip Larkin, Edwin Arlington Robinson is a poet better read in reduction. A good Selected, perhaps, or even just a handful of some of his better-known work will do more for his reputation than an appraisal of everything he’s ever published. This wasn’t always the case, however, as Robinson won three Pulitzer Prizes, and was even called the ‘greatest American poet’ by Yvor Winters at a time when a dozen or so far better American writers had already peaked. This shows how easily E.A. Robinson can worm into one’s mind, in his best poems, as well as the ease with which his critics are taken in by their own aesthetic biases…including Winters, himself, who was quick to accept whatever fit his aesthetic worldview at the expense of the poetry itself.

Yet that shouldn’t take away from what’s on the page, either. And while Yvor Winters was wrong for placing weird and artificial limits on poets – ‘Write little; do it well’ was a chief motto – his love for brevity sometimes led him to the right judgments, too, as with one of E.A. Robinson’s best poems:

The Sheaves

Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,
Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Like nothing that was ever bought or sold
It waited there, the body and the mind;
And with a mighty meaning of a kind
That … Continue reading →