SOURCE: “Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Lost Tradition,” in Enabling Acts: Selected Essays in Criticism, University of Missouri Press, 1976, pp. 7-26.

In the following essay, originally published in 1954, Coxe identifies strengths in Robinson's poetry that place him among the most important American poets of the twentieth century.

To the contemporary reader it seems strange that Allen Tate, in 1933, should have referred to E. A. Robinson as the “most famous of living poets” and again as the writer of “some of the finest lyrics of modern times.” As far as most of us are concerned, Robinson ekes out a survival in “anthological pickle,” as he called it, and few readers try to go beyond, for if any poet has been damned by the anthologists it is Robinson. Why the decline in his reputation? Did critics puff him far beyond his deserts? Can a critic today judge him on the basis...