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Oct. 29th, 2011 01:19 am69. Selected Poems of E.A. Robinson, ed. Faggen
Can't quite give this a 2nd in parentheses because I remember skipping the longer, blank verse poems eight years ago. I've read lots of Robinson since, probably nearly all but the really long poems, but not, you know, scientifically or down-writtenly.
I love him and he hasn't suffered in the slightest in the rereading. Neither did Frost earlier this year, but Robinson I feel even closer to. Robinson's eminence is hazy - you don't think of him as up with Stevens, say, but Stevens never wrote "For a Dead Lady." It's hazy even within individual poems, where often he's just interesting or confusing you for a while and suddenly someone visiting who knows everything drops one of everything's secrets.
I actually started with Donald Hall's selection and switched to Faggen's just because I remembered I hadn't quite finished it back in downtown Vancouver, but found they're 95% identical. It's interesting the percent of divergence you find for different poets, in how they're selected. Browning has the biggest range, I think - not that there isn't a core of must-selects, there's always such a core, but almost everything Browning wrote some anthologist or other selects and no one else has. Whereas almost any Tennyson selection will closely resemble any other with a similar page count - conceivably excepting which of the four or five better Idylls gets in. I'd have put in more from Robinson's first couple of books.
I think of the 2002-2003 period as a non-reading one because I finished very few books, but I read tons of poetry. Just a non-consecutive kind of reading, I guess, for need or joy rather than learning or credit. Probably much healthier. It coincided with my first appreciation of American poets, and seemed to fit them - I still think of this as how to read them, stray Leaves of Grass, random Emerson paragraphs. Oddly I did this with Wordsworth too. Probably because you have to or you'll stop, there's too much even before his thousands of pages of depressing late verse. Whereas Browning - who Robinson stays lovingly close to, probably too close, in his blank verse monologues - I tackled, sometimes abandoned, by the volume. But that was earlier, in that first great inhalation. The American phase was the autumn of my reading in a lot of ways.
The weather was like this then, dark and wet, and it must have been October or November. I still remember the couch, the hour - I think I'd read most of an edition of his early poems, but those came before he got quite so sad, if sad's the word, so I remember my awe. I must have been at my happiest but he affected me about the same, before I even knew which poems would be about me.
(That must be why I switched editions, rather, to complete the return. It's somehow a lovely book, despite being only a Penguin. Sargent's one of my favorite painters. But it was more the texture. I guess because I was closing the book so often and just stroking it or rubbing it on my face, the way you do in between when the poems are too much.)
Can't quite give this a 2nd in parentheses because I remember skipping the longer, blank verse poems eight years ago. I've read lots of Robinson since, probably nearly all but the really long poems, but not, you know, scientifically or down-writtenly.
I love him and he hasn't suffered in the slightest in the rereading. Neither did Frost earlier this year, but Robinson I feel even closer to. Robinson's eminence is hazy - you don't think of him as up with Stevens, say, but Stevens never wrote "For a Dead Lady." It's hazy even within individual poems, where often he's just interesting or confusing you for a while and suddenly someone visiting who knows everything drops one of everything's secrets.
I actually started with Donald Hall's selection and switched to Faggen's just because I remembered I hadn't quite finished it back in downtown Vancouver, but found they're 95% identical. It's interesting the percent of divergence you find for different poets, in how they're selected. Browning has the biggest range, I think - not that there isn't a core of must-selects, there's always such a core, but almost everything Browning wrote some anthologist or other selects and no one else has. Whereas almost any Tennyson selection will closely resemble any other with a similar page count - conceivably excepting which of the four or five better Idylls gets in. I'd have put in more from Robinson's first couple of books.
I think of the 2002-2003 period as a non-reading one because I finished very few books, but I read tons of poetry. Just a non-consecutive kind of reading, I guess, for need or joy rather than learning or credit. Probably much healthier. It coincided with my first appreciation of American poets, and seemed to fit them - I still think of this as how to read them, stray Leaves of Grass, random Emerson paragraphs. Oddly I did this with Wordsworth too. Probably because you have to or you'll stop, there's too much even before his thousands of pages of depressing late verse. Whereas Browning - who Robinson stays lovingly close to, probably too close, in his blank verse monologues - I tackled, sometimes abandoned, by the volume. But that was earlier, in that first great inhalation. The American phase was the autumn of my reading in a lot of ways.
The weather was like this then, dark and wet, and it must have been October or November. I still remember the couch, the hour - I think I'd read most of an edition of his early poems, but those came before he got quite so sad, if sad's the word, so I remember my awe. I must have been at my happiest but he affected me about the same, before I even knew which poems would be about me.
(That must be why I switched editions, rather, to complete the return. It's somehow a lovely book, despite being only a Penguin. Sargent's one of my favorite painters. But it was more the texture. I guess because I was closing the book so often and just stroking it or rubbing it on my face, the way you do in between when the poems are too much.)
