This dissertation has been 63-2545 microfilmed exactly as received ROBINSON, William Ronald, 1927- EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON: THE POETRY OF THE ACT. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1962 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilm..,iu~., Ann Arbor, Mi.- hn EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON* THE POETRY OF THE ACT DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University Etjr William Ronald Robinson, B.A., M. A. ****** The Ohio State University 1962 Approved by ' Adviseil Department of English ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to The Macmillan Company for permission to quote from the Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1937)* the Selected Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson (ed. Ridgely Torrence, 1940) and the Essays and Introductions (1961) of William Butler Yeats; and to Charles Scribners' Sons for permission to quote from George Santayana's The Life of Reason (One-Volume Edition, 195*0* I am also indebted to Professor John Harold Wilson, whose en­ couragement and advice made my graduate career, and thus this work, possible; and to Professor Roy Harvey Pearce, my mentor in literature, who taught me the uses of the heart and mind in the humanities and thereby provided direction and discipline for my curiosity. Of the many others who have influenced my intellectual life, I shall mention but one, my wife, Mina J, Robinson, who left the way clear for me to pursue a graduate career and who was indispensable in bringing this work to completion. ii Your doom Is to be free. The seed of truth Is rooted In you. and the fruit is yours For you to eat aione. You cannot share it. Though you may give it, and a few thereby May taste of it, and so not wholly starve. Homan Bartholow Growth of Man - like Growth of Nature - Gravitates within - Atmosphere, and Sun endorse it - But it stir - alone - Each - its difficult Ideal Must achieve - Itself - Through the solitary prowess Of a Silent Life - Effort - is the sole condition - Patience of Itself - Patience of opposing forces - And intact Belief - Looking on - is the Department Of its Audience - But Transaction - is assisted E|y no Countenance - Qnily Dickinson iii PREFACE For some time now it has been customary to regard the literature of the American Renaissance as falling into two traditions stemming from Emerson and Hawthorne, and it is sometimes assumed that the two traditions are mutually exclusive views of life with truth being the prerogative of one or the other. They are not alternatives, however, but complements, for man is simultaneously a transparent eyeball and a link in the great chain of humanity, a private and social creature, a metaphysical and moral being. Because Emerson went to one extreme in abstracting man from society in order to define and free his spiritual being, it was inevitable that Hawthorne, to right the balance, should go to the other extreme of identifying man's humanity with his moral responsibility to a community. But in giving dominant priority to one aspect of life, neither achieved a comprehensive account of man's being; both vividly isolated one term but at the cost of telling only partial truths. Yet taken together their work is a symptom and definition of human existence as they experienced it, the complete truth of a world in which life is a taut dialectic between the radical antitheses of individual and society. The intrusion of one man into the scene, Emerson felt, spoiled the meditative value of nature ("the poet," he wrote in "Nature," "finds something ridiculous in his delight until he is out of the sight of men"l), and Hawthorne, as exemplified by the forest scene in The Scarlet ^ The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Bnerson, Centenary Edition (Boston and New York, 1963-190^), I, 55T iy Letter, viewed the retreat into nature out of the sight of men as the surest way to self .alienation, A direct heir of their thought and art, Edwin Arlington Robinson inherited from them the task of reuniting what they had set radically apart. In his early years Robinson's closest affinity was to Hawthorne, whose tough humanism he found to his liking, but a strong streak of Idealism or Transcendentalism drew him closer and closer to Emerson as he aged, until in his late poetry he was near to being an outright Emersonian or Transcendentalist, But though he eventually eliminated from his canon a n his poems on American poets except the one on Bnerson and spoke of Qnerson as the greatest American poet,2 he never went all the way; though he finally located the higher source of realization and morality outside society, he acknowledged as aa essential truth of the solitary self the need to live for others, Robinson, in other words, was tunable to eliminate the man from the scene, and therefore the delights of solitude were always somewhat ridiculous for him. Yet social morality was also ridiculous for him— indeed, it was malicious and destructive— and moral sanity oould be achieved only through a transcendental spiritual enlightenment. So, for Robinson, no matter whether alone or in a crowd, a man always carries his social life and solitariness with him, each eternally qualifying and limiting the other. Although Robinson worked out what was to him the necessary relation between the transcendental and human, he did not put an end 2 Robinson's words were, "Qnerson is the greatest poet who ever wrote in America. Passages scattered here and there in his work surely are the greatest of American poetry* In fact, I think there are lines and sentences in Emerson's poetry that are as great as anything any­ where"— Joyce Kilmer, Literature in the Making (New York, 1917)* P* 270. v to the problem which results from the radical antitheses of individual and society initiated in America by Emerson. That problem is still very much with us, and, in fact, after a period of otherworldliness in which disgust with man drove writers to disaffiliate themselves from contemporary social life, we are reconsidering the problem in an attempt to arrive at a more balanced view than that extreme disjunc­ tion. In the work of Albert Camus, Saul Bellow, and William Golding— to mention only a representative example of fiction writers— an attempt is being made to achieve a more viable relation between the transcen­ dental and human. The effort is slanted in favor of the human, but it is recognized that man's existence is the meeting and mating of the two. William Golding writes, for instance, in Free Fall. Nick's universe is real he is a scientist, socialist and rationalist . and this mode we call the spirit breathes through the universe and does not touch it; touches only the dark things, held prisoner, incommuni­ cado, touches, judges, sentences and passes on. £rhis, Miss Romans Pringle'sj world is real} both worlds are real. There is no bridge. Both worlds exist. They meet in m e . 3 And after a mystical experience of the great cosmic unity of being which he finds useless as a guide for human conduct, the narrator-protagonist of this novel sees clearly what is between man and man and says. The substance of these pillars supporting the order of things among men as opposed to the cosmic order was a kind of vital rorality, not the relationship of a man to remote posterity nor even to a social system, but the relationship of individual man to individual man— once an irrelevance but now seen to be the forge in which all change, all value, all life is beaten out into a good or a bad shape.^ 3 London, 1959. pp. 210-211, k Ibid., p. 189. vi As folding sees life, nan Inhabits tvo worlds which cannot be derived from one another and which make conflicting claims upon him, but his final allegiance is always to man, to other Individual persons. The transcendental experience— for him, Camus, Bellow, even for Jack Kerouac, in On the Road— is not an end in itself, is not sufficient, but is a catalyst in the achievement of a good life between specific human beings. This continuous concern with the relation between the transcen­ dental and the human from Eaerson to the present amounts to a tradition which can perhaps be identified most dramatically as the meeting of East and West. Emerson and the Transcendentalists in general, it will be remembered, read widely in Eastern religion and philosophy, and frequently preferred quoting from these sources rather than Christian or Western ones. And they found there a concept of reality and man— of the divine, nature, and the soul— compatible with their own sense of things. This concept, also latent in the naturalism of Western science, has become progressively free of Judaeo-Christian and Qreek habits of mind, until in the last one hundred years it has effectively challenged the established concepts of the tradition. Consequently, the attraction of Eastern thought has increased rather than waned, with the result that George Santayana proclaimed an affinity with Neopla- tonic and Indian philosophy,^and Robinson could say, • . J. and I are reading up . on Oriental Religions. I have been Interested to find out that Christianity is in reality nothing more than Buddhism 5 See "A Brief History of KF Opinions," The Philosophy of Santayana, ed. Erwin Edman (The Modern Library, 1936), pp. 1-21. vii humanized. "6 And we are all familiar, if not sympathetic, with the rage of Zen Buddhism today* The phrase "the meeting of East and West" can be misleading if taken to mean nothing more than the introduction of ideas of external origin into Western culture or the interpenetration of two cultures facilitated by technology* Actually, the meeting is a clash of contradictions inherent in the Western tradition which Eastern thought helps to clarify and perhaps resolve* Now there are other contexts in which this study of Robinson can be placed— such as the history of the idea of poetry or of the influence of empiricism on the arts— but this meeting of what is in effect Eastern metaphysics and psychology with Western morality seems to me to be the most illuminating and fruitful* And this context or tradition comes most clearly into focus when it is recognized that the essential task created by the meeting is, in Robinson's terms, the humanizing of Buddhism.