AnyBook4Less.com
Find the Best Price on the Web
Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Developed by Fintix
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |  
 
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money

Selected Poems

Please fill out form in order to compare prices
Title: Selected Poems
by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Faggen
ISBN: 0-14-018988-2
Publisher: Penguin Books
Pub. Date: 01 December, 1997
Format: Paperback
Volumes: 1
List Price(USD): $15.00
Your Country
Currency
Delivery
Include Used Books
Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble
Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Customer Reviews

Rating: 5
Summary: "There was more than sound. . . more than just an axe."
Comment: Like fellow New England poet Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson helped limber up traditional, rhymed American verse, steering it away from the stilted and bombastic norms of the 19th century while also avoiding free verse. More importantly, Robinson wrote about "the other half" -- drunks, dreamers, women-chasers, narcissistic suicides, jettisoned lover-boys, devastated widows, brutal misers. By doing so, he paved the way for the modernist obsesssion with the "common man". (In fact, he is still best known for his biting characterizations of Luke Havergal, Richard Cory, and Cliff Klingenhagen). A tense but satirical electricity runs through all of his work. As Frost said, "Robinson's theme was unhappiness itself, but his skill was as happy as it was playful... His life was a revel in the felicities of language."

The earlier poetry is predominately concerned with failure and misery, "the withered souls of men", as Robinson put it. (Robinson wrote much this poetry while working as a ticket collector on the New York subway, not long out of Harvard). Men have paid a price for their innocence and are unable, like Zola (whom he praises in a poem) to look squarely at the "compromising chart of hell" they have created. Great democratic mobs judge each others' grief, a grief they can seldom comprehend. Writers worship "the flicker and not the flame". Misery and the passing of things toll like a villanelle in most of Robinson's early work: "There is ruin and decay," "long centuries have come and gone," the world seems to be churning toward the "western gate" of darkness, death's portal.

By contrast, the more mature Robinson is more interested in light and voices and spiritual illumination. He sees great value in our intellectual and spiritual struggles, our so-called "modern" ideas, even though they may be "some day be quaint as any [tale] told / In almagest or chronicle of old." The older Robinson does not fight against the ultimately unknowable realities. He is not a disjointed Romantic raging against the misnamed "encroachments" of time. He is glad that reality remains a mystery in the end, a great and indecipherable code of silent stars and sheaves of girl-like, golden wheat that speak love in their very silence. The world, like true poetry, has "a mighty meaning of a kind / That tells the more the more it is not told."

I bought this book several years ago in Malta during a bout of homesickness and it has been blowing my mind ever since. Check it out!

Similar Books:

Title: The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
by Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad, David Roessel
ISBN: 0679764089
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Pub. Date: 01 November, 1995
List Price(USD): $18.00
Title: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
by Wallace Stevens
ISBN: 0679726691
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Pub. Date: 01 January, 1990
List Price(USD): $16.00
Title: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
by Emily Dickinson
ISBN: 0316184136
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Pub. Date: 30 January, 1976
List Price(USD): $19.95
Title: The Complete Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
ISBN: 0374515360
Publisher: Noonday Press
Pub. Date: 01 September, 1996
List Price(USD): $16.00
Title: American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
ISBN: 0375701427
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Pub. Date: 01 February, 1998
List Price(USD): $14.95

Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!

Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments

Powered by Apache