When feeling low, I plop a poet in my thoughts – their work, facts, portrait, fate – and let it fizz there therapeutically, gradually detaching me from my darkness: not a poet I know well or perhaps at all, so they might arise in my imagination like a holograph, whom I study as they study me. I love the shy urgency of a fresh acquaintance. What are we to make of one another?

I last read Edward Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) as a college freshman, in a survey course on modern poetry. And not much of him, for he was sliding into polite obscurity for being old-fashioned. Fashion dictates education no less than dress. Technical complexity and thematic obliquity kept scholars busy. Ezra Pound’s Cantos, however inscrutable, were rich in theses.

Robinson wrote rhymed lines of regular length, sad to say. Worse he was popular with non-professional readers. A poem that could be read with pleasure by non-professionals was deficient in ambition, obviously. Tunes were likewise denounced in concert music. To please was to forfeit academic respect.

Gradually, time bleaches context from art, permitting us to see it as a contemporary work. In its infancy, any work of art explicitly or implicitly critiques its predecessors, but those disputes die with the disputants. Few topics more tedious than the aesthetic spats of yesteryear.

Robinson’s mood is grim, but we suspect, like his famous avatar’s, with cause.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedMiniver Cheevy, child of scorn, Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;He wept that he was ever born, And he had reasons.

The reason that blazes from Robinson’s biography is that, as a young man, he lost the woman he loved to his handsome but shallow older brother. We sense how such a psychic wound could fester, especially as he watched his sister-in-law made wretched by his brother’s failings. Robinson, though he liked women, never married. Once burned, twice shy.

Robinson left a gallery of emotional sad-sacks, whom he portrays with both sympathy and derision, as if, through them, he was trying to buck himself up. Miniver Cheevy, James Wetherell, Cliff Klingenhagen, Richard Cory, Bewick Finzer, Eben Flood were household names in their hour. Each portrait is so acidulous and, yes, entertaining, it is hard to choose a favorite. Take twenty minutes and read all. The capacious Web makes them easy to retrieve.

I settled on “Reuben Bright.” Read (or reread) the little verse below, then explain the poet’s attitude toward his subject. An honorable industrious gent, Reuben, though a butcher not a brute – lost his wife, whom he loved – was all broke up about it. But was it manly that he

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published cried like a great baby half that night, And made the women cry to see him cry?

Surely that’s overdoing it, Robinson (I mean, Reuben)! Chin up!

Then, the butcher’s peculiar behavior after his wife’s funeral was finished and paid for. He not only buries all traces of her in a gruesome second funeral, he abandons the whole life they had shared, extinguishing his livelihood – and identity – by tearing “down the slaughterhouse.” That’s overdoing it and then some!

Was Reuben’s/Robinson’s excessive response to life’s sorrows admirable, contemptible, ludicrous? Well yes, no, hard to say. We don’t know enough about him. Does he have another identity to graduate into or is he giving up on life altogether? We may think we know Robinson’s gallery of sufferers but invariably we’ve got them wrong. They go and do something nuttily “out of character” – a “character” which our ignorance has imposed on them. Do we know anybody we think we know? Or are we all dangerous surprises, even to ourselves?

This is very modern.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedReuben Bright

Because he was a butcher and thereby Did earn an honest living (and did right), I would not have you think that Reuben Bright Was any more a brute than you or I; For when they told him that his wife must die, He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright, And cried like a great baby half that night, And made the women cry to see him cry.

And after she was dead, and he had paid The singers and the sexton and the rest, He packed a lot of things that she had made Most mournfully away in an old chest Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.