![]() The wife's angle is the most explored, but we learn something of the way the husband feels. The narrator moves novelistically between points of view. This marriage, in fact, is the third, most difficult "character" in the story, and I wonder if it's altogether fanciful to see the unusual use of triplicate rhymes in each stanza (three B rhymes, and three consecutive C rhymes) as denoting this. ![]() Here, two antagonists are revealed in the long series of defining moments that have bound them in courtship and marriage. Robinson is always interested in how individual characters behave at their defining moments (as in his poems Reuben Bright and Miniver Cheevy). ![]() In this week's poem, Eros Turannos, he is at his most astute, his analysis of the bargaining tactics in a seemingly "co-dependent" marriage reminding us, perhaps, of Tolstoy's famous observation: "happy families are all the same every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." He was, paradoxically, an innovative poet who quietly fulfilled the old, elusive Romantic doctrine of humble attentiveness to Everyman. The significance of that achievement, which Robinson shares with a near-contemporary, Edgar Lee Masters, can be too easily submerged by the more dramatic renovations of imagism. Poet and critic Louise Bogan described Edwin Arlington Robinson's 1897 collection, The Children of the Night, as "one of the hinges upon which American poetry was able to turn from the sentimentality of the 90s toward modern veracity and psychological truth". ![]()
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