It has been a long while—seventy-two years, to be exact—since Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)was hailed in his obituaries as America’s foremost poet. In recent times, his work has been tacitly dismissed as old hat. Few current candidates for MFA degrees in creative writing, I suspect, have ventured any deeper into it than “Miniver Cheevy” and “Richard Cory”—items still, as the poet himself remarked, “pickled in anthological brine.” Even back in his critical study of 1969, Ellsworth Barnard was sadly marveling that in the thirty years following the poet’s death his name and fame had suffered a “slow return to obscurity.” Ever since, that process seems only to have accelerated.

Causes for this neglect aren’t hard to find. To the with-it poet of nowadays, Robinson’s rhyming stanzas must look stodgy, his mastery of meter imperceptible, his poems boringly sane and rational, his symmetrical stanzas and sonnets less exciting in their appearance on the page than barrages of scatter-shot free verse. (Robinson didn’t condemn free verse, but he had no use for it. “I write,” he said, “badly enough as it is.”) The shortage of imagery in his work makes it appear gaunt and spare. Compared to Robinson’s poems, Robert Frost’s seems almost sensuous. Moreover, Robinson’s shy, retiring bachelor life has hardly made him a figure of legend. He neither belonged to a big-name poetic movement nor founded any, and so became invisible to the kind of literary historian who can notice only flamboyant drum majors leading parades of Imagist