SOURCE: “Laughter at the Abyss: Hardy and Robinson,” in The Long View: Essays on the Discipline of Hope and Poetic Craft, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1991, pp. 71-114.

In the following essay, Pack discusses humor in the poetry of Robinson and Thomas Hardy.

I

E. A. Robinson is the American inheritor of Thomas Hardy's unusual gift for the creation of dramas within the confines of lyric form. In both poets, the ability to tell stories, to create characters who reveal themselves under the pressure of circumstance, is enhanced by their expressive control of image, rhyme, meter, and stanzaic form. They are both able to epitomize a human life in the rendering of a particular incident and the behavior it elicits. Hardy and Robinson combine similar lyric and narrative techniques, and they are philosophically akin in their gloomy assessment of human endeavor: their main theme is failure—failure in...