SOURCE: “E. A. Robinson, A Voice Out of the Darkness,” in Literary Reflections, A Shoring of Images 1960-1993, Northeastern University Press, 1993, pp. 154-76.

In the following essay, originally published in 1973, Lewis identifies Robinson as one of the key figures in American poetry of the period from 1890 to 1910.

The period from about 1890 to 1910 is one of the hardest to define, and to appraise, in modern American literature. There was, on the one hand, a genuine vigor in the area of fiction—though one masterpiece, Billy Budd, remained unpublished until the late 1920s and another, Sister Carrie (1900), was, at the time of its publication, generally ignored. Still, Stephen Crane flared brilliantly, if briefly, and Henry James was passing through some of the ripest years of his career; Sarah Orne Jewett and other gifted women were writing quietly in various sections of New England. But the situation in poetry was a...