Oh, I know :
I know, I know, I know ,
How can I forget?
This world is a mess,
A sinking menace of loveliness and danger.
Fumbling to touch hands in the dark,
Their hands fluttered into flames.
I know , and yet-
Just mention their names
To any stranger,
Anyone at all.
He will recall
Not the strange menace of their loveliness ,
But only the lovers .
THE LONELY POET
Many of the poets in our time were love poets devoted to real
women. Nobody knows and all doubt that Edwin Arlington
Robinson ever had sexual intercourse. I pray in the silences of my soul
that somehow all critics, historians, biographers , librarians and the
rest of us somehow missed one afternoon or one whole sleepless night
of Robinson's sixty-five years while, unknown to us eternally, some
kind understanding woman took the poet into her body at least once .
Like our other great men-Hardy, Williams, Jeffers, Lawrence ,
Frost-Robinson suffered the curse of Adam by going through the
hell of this world. But alone and unlike the others, he knew hell
without ever having known paradise, thrown our of the garden ,
apparently , without ever having eaten the fruit , outcast before he was
born .
As far as we know .
But do we know so much?
I hope , while the other poets rest in the peace they earned
through long lives, that Robinson alone is still alive in the body
somewhere on earth , making love with a woman underground . It is a
good hope. It is the hope of a living man. We don ' t know anything
real about the dead.
