in criticism of the Eighteenth Amendment to our Constitution. Rather they are criticisms of the whole spirit of the machine age and of the idea that virtue can be legislated into people. Whether such a subject makes, not good poetry, but good poetry of the quality which Mr. Robinson habitually writes, is a question. At least the necessary formalism and the necessary confining of a very complicated issue to the two extremes of Demos, intoxicated by scientific management, versus Dionysus, make for a certain remoteness from actuality in the treatment. And the style of the poems is more suited to Mr. Robinson's other and subtler preoccupations, interests which are not the stuff of controversy.

In most of Mr. Robinson's poetry his complex and subtle style is appropriately used for studies of complex and recondite human situations. This explains, of course the slow growth of his popularity, the legend of his obscurity (which charge finds him frankly puzzled) and the rather grudging praise of English critics, especially those among them who are themselves poets in a more romantic vein.

It is true that he is a grave poet; and I remember with what unanimous choice the critics of his book, "The Man Against the Sky," seized upon and quoted a picturesque touch in "The Gift of God," a mother's crowded and enraptured vision of her son's future:

As upward through her dream he fares,

Half clouded with a crimson fall

Of roses thrown on marble stairs.

That seemed to the critics a romantically decorative note for this austere New England poet of character and of characters and of philosophical questionings.

And yet out of that particular lion had always come sweetness. My own introduction to his work was through Floyd Dell's enthusiasm-this was many years ago-for his "The White Lights, (Broadway, 1906),” published in "The Town Down the River":

When in from Delos came the gold

That held the dream of Pericles,
When first Athenian ears were told
The tumult of Euripides,
When men met Aristophanes,

Who fledged them with immortal quills-
Here, where the time knew none of these,
There were some islands and some hills.

When Rome went ravening to see

The sons of mothers end their days,
When Flaccus bid Leuconoë

To banish her Chaldean ways,
When first the pearled, alembic phrase
Of Maro into music ran-

Here there was neither blame nor praise
For Rome, or for the Mantuan.

When Avon, like a faery floor,

Lay freighted to the eyes of One,

With galleons laden long before
By moonlit wharves in Avalon-

Here, where the white lights have begun
To seethe a way for something fair,
No prophet knew, from what was done,
That there was triumph in the air.

It might be said that that lyric is as burdened-or perhaps "loaded" is freer from the wrong sort of connotation-with thought as it is with allusions, but this is no mere superadded thought-it is lyrical thought, the actual reverberations of Broadway upon a mind that not only is associative, but also sees things in their movements, their contrasts, their perspectives. Occasionally, it is true, the poet's thought is not lyrical but purely philosophic, and then one feels that the verse form is an encumbrance. Take "Octaves," for instance, one of the poems dating from the volume, "Captain Craig." There are twenty-three octaves, and the poem is starred with fine things; but parts of it suffer from lack of definition, and the remarks that follow and comment upon the question, "Where does a dead man go?" are reminiscent of hair splitting articles on immortality and its justification in the Hibbert Journal. And that sort of thing needs space -and prose. But after all there is very little of that in Robinson. If he does have the sort of metaphysical mind that is credited to the Scotch he has also a Scotch sense of humor and a Scotch, rather than a purely New England, sternness of moral fibre. All three of these are seen in his early long poem, "Captain Craig," the tale of a derelict and philosophic soul,

rescued by a little group of friends from death by starvation in pious Tilbury town, which

might have made him sing by feeding him
Till he should march again, but probably
Such yielding would have jeopardized the rhythm;
They found it more melodious to shout
Right on, with unmolested adoration,
To keep the tune as it had always been,
To trust in God, and let the Captain starve.

(Robinson is curiously fond of these round-about conceits of expression), their beneficiary begins to treat them to a philosophic lecture, all but the teller of the tale

But the teller stays on, and through talk, and then through letters, and finally in a sort of will and testament which the old derelict reads to the group, we have a wryly humorous, philosophic, and ethical commentary upon life. It is occasionally hard reading, although there is passage after passage that is not only philosophic but purely poetic and crystal clear upon first reading:

Ah, friends, friends,

There are these things we do not like to know:
They trouble us, they make us hesitate,
They touch us and we try to put them off.
We banish one another and then say
That we are left alone: the midnight leaf
That rattles where it hangs above the snow-
Gaunt, fluttering, forlorn-scarcely may seem
So cold in all its palsied loneliness

As we, we frozen brothers, who have yet
Profoundly and severely to find out

That there is more of unpermitted love

In most men's reticence than most men think.

While in sentence after sentence there are such flashes of wisdom as:

Not as a moral pedant who drags chains

Of his unearned ideals after him . .

And since we have spoken already of philosophy we may turn from this early poem to a comparatively recent one in which the poet philosophizes directlyindeed, it may be his answer to the charge, ridiculed recently by him in an interview, that he is a pessimist "The Man Against the Sky." Here the figure of a man crossing the ridge of a sunset-illuminated hill, symbolizes man's journey, a journey meaningful or meaningless as it is made in the light of faith or in negation-though by faith is not implied the sort of thing that is uncritically held to be the antithesis of agnosticism: