SOURCE: “The Ambivalence of Stance in Edwin Arlington Robinson's Early Poems and Letters,” in Style, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 87-112.

In the following essay, Blumenthal focuses on “New England,” “Dear Friends,” “Doctor of Billiards,” and “Richard Cory” in a discussion of Robinson's ambivalent response to the conventions and values of his hometown, Gardiner, Maine.

I

Casual readers and professional critics of Edwin Arlington Robinson, both the poet's own contemporaries and his more modern readers, comment repeatedly on his New England reticence, on his penchant for elliptical utterance. Many of these have conveyed their sense that he is unnecessarily obscure, bent on frustrating a rapport between reader and author. Robinson himself protested the reverse, urging friends to warn him of obscurity in his work lest such passages should make their way into print. But his concern was not sufficient to keep Yvor Winters from contemptuously labeling his lyric approach...