Every heard of him? Mezey provides another example:īy artists builded and by genius planned. What is a sonnet? ‘T is the tear that fellĪnd that little morsel was by Watson Gilder, the John Ashbery of his day, famous in his age and held in high esteem by his contemporaries. Robinson, the luminaries of the times were writing chestnuts like the following: As Robert Mezey points out in his introduction to The Poetry of E.A. Times and poetic tastes were changing, and for good reason. Until the very end of his life, Robinson was ignored. Ideas are, of course, inseparable from the medium, but much memorable poetry is not important for what is said. Nine-tenths of poetry is how it’s done….
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I know I like to get my licks in when it comes to free verse (it’s like skeet shooting), but appreciation of Robinson’s poetry is heightened when a reader understands a little about his life.
A good subject is heightened by the language’s expressiveness, and vice versa. A poem is also an excursion into the felicities of language. Where modern poets write as though the poem were just another species of prose, poetry to Robinson is more than content. ~ EA Robinsonīut where Robinson’s voice may sound modern, his heart remains with the classicists. And judging from some of their results, I am inclined to agree with them. I know that many of the new writers insist that it is harder to write good vers libre than to write good rhymed poetry.(In the environs of Boston and Amherst the British accent was still studiously cultivated.) If we heard Emily Dickinson speak today, she would probably sound more British than American. I also don’t feel a uniquely modern American diction in her poetry (as opposed to British). Some readers might argue for Emily Dickinson, but Dickinson never ventured beyond the common meter of the hymn and ballad. ~ EA Robinsonīefore Frost brought a vernacular gait to Iambic Pentameter, Robinson was the first poet to bring a modern American diction to meter and form. About the best I can say is that the best free verse that I have seen contains subject matter for good poems. I have only one objection to free verse and that is that it seems to me to be a makeshift.
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