The New Criterion
America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life
- Harry Mount, the London Telegraph
FeaturesApril 2007 The enduring specter of E. A. Robinson by X.J. Kennedy On the underappreciated American poet. It has been a long while—seventy-two years, to be exact—since Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)was hailed in his obituaries as America’s foremost poet. In recent times, his work has been tacitly dismissed as old hat. Few current candidates for MFA degrees in creative writing, I suspect, have ventured any deeper into it than “Miniver Cheevy” and “Richard Cory”—items still, as the poet himself remarked, “pickled in anthological brine.” Even back in his critical study of 1969, Ellsworth Barnard was sadly marveling that in the thirty years following the poet’s death his name and fame had suffered a “slow return to obscurity.” Ever since, that process seems only to have accelerated. Causes for this neglect aren’t hard to find. To the with-it poet of nowadays, Robinson’s rhyming stanzas must look stodgy, his mastery ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 25 April 2007, on page 20 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-enduring-specter-of-E--A--Robinson-3126
rate this article for your user profile
E-mail to friend
|
Christopher, for better & for worse On the critic, polemicist & raconteur Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011).
Webcasts
Anthony Daniels on the Euro Crisis
Andrew C. McCarthy: The Muslim Threat
Roger Kimball: The Grim Future of Statism Weblog 
|
add a comment
you must have an account to post a comment. {register now}