SOURCE: An afterword in The Torrent and The Night Before: A Facsimile Edition After 100 Years of his First Book, by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Tilbury House, Publishers, 1996,

In the following essay, Justice broadly places Robinson and The Torrent and the Night Before in the context of modern American poetry.

Looking back now, a century having passed, one sees and hears very clearly the dreadful sameness of the poetry Robinson encountered in the magazines of his youth, magazines Robinson himself could scarcely get a hearing in. The versification was competently banal, the diction was usually archaic or otherwise stilted, the subject matter was self-consciously poetical. Nor was this the worst that could be said of it. It was much then as it is today: only certain views, only certain feelings were felt to be proper for poetry. (Of course, our acceptable views differ vastly from those of a hundred years...