'Poetry That Is Not Noticeably Eccentric'

Two poets seldom linked came together in the New York Times on September 8, 1912. The writer was Joyce Kilmer, known forever as the author of “Trees,” who would die six years later during the second battle of the Marne. His subject was Edwin Arlington Robinson, age forty-one, by then author of four collections of poetry and such poems as “Miniver Cheevy” and “Richard Cory.” Kilmer hailed Robinson as “a classic poet.” “Not as a prophet, not as a teacher,” he writes, “but as a student of mankind does Robinson hold his place among poets. Always he looks at humanity patiently, earnestly, searchingly. His poems . . . are compounded of sympathy and humor.” That’s as good an encapsulation of Robinson’s sensibility as I’ve encountered. He has a fiction writer’s devotion to character that recalls Chekhov’s. In a thank-note to Kilmer, Robinson wrote: “You say things in it that I have been waiting for someone to say.” Almost four years later, on April 9, 1916, the Times published Kilmer’s…