'Fullness For the Time That Was to Come'

Donald Justice on Edwin Arlington Robinson: “Robinson’s techniques were more or less the same as those of his contemporaries, the meters strict always, so strict and even jingly at times as to suggest light verse. Only—and this makes all the difference—the pieties are not quite in place . . .” After two hundred fifty years, America has produced a handful of world-class poets, and many good ones. Robinson I rank as the greatest to emerge between Dickinson and Eliot. His only rival among close contemporaries is Robert Frost. A reader has accused me of exaggerating Robinson’s importance. I’m reminded of Virginia Woolf’s assessment of Middlemarch: “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” The same can be said of Robinson. Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Roethke, for instance, write essentially for children and the childish. By “pieties” Justice means the Emersonian bromides and sentimentalities, often religious or warmed-over Romantic in nature, that have dominated…