![]() ![]() This had its physical symbol, for me, in his hands, those hands with the long fingers that seemed made not to grasp objects-saws or hammers, hardly even pens- but rather to rub his forehead when that queer half-scowl of perturbed thought visited it. ![]() Phil tells me that Nietzsche says: “Without superfluous time the mind cannot perceive.” This is very Thoreau-like.-: Robinson adds: “The superfluous time put Nietzsche behind the bars, after all.”įor all his penetration there was about him a sort of helplessness in practical affairs that made him arouse pity as well as admiration. He was already at work on “Captain Craig,” whom we used to call “the Pauper.”Īnother journal entry is worth quoting to exemplify the realistic thrusts with which he would puncture the bubbles of our romantic fancies: Butler, to whose generous help he afterwards owed so much. Robinson,” and a photograph portrait taken by his friend William E. ![]() The book here mentioned is “The Children of the Night,” published in 1897, of which my copy, dated May 81, 1898, bears on the flyleaf, in his microscopic but meticulous handwriting, “Edwin A. Talking about sleeping, he said: ‘Eight hours is all a man ought to lie stretched out.’” He was more articulate than I have ever seen him before his conversation bore out more the impression his book gives. “Robinson took a walk with me,” I note in my journal in February, 1899, “and then came to my room and ate eclairs. His laconic comments on persons and books had a repressed wit peculiar to him, giving the impression of a wisdom at once shrewd and magnanimous. In my journal I find the entry for May 31, 1898:Įdwin Arlington Robinson spent the afternoon with me, and a curious chap he is: you have to wait hours for him to say anything but he is interesting enough, nevertheless. In contrast with my other friends among the Harvard poets, especially with the romantic warmth of William Vaughn Moody and the delicate idealism of Philip Henry Savage, his personality seemed to me at first dry, almost prosaic. His eyes gleamed and glowed behind his spectacles, alternately quiet with poetic penetration and dancing with humorous irony. Robinson was tall and in a sensitive way handsome, with dark hair, flowing moustache, and fresh healthy color. We met for the first time in the spring of 1898, when he was working, I believe, in some magazine office in Cambridge, and I was assisting in the English courses of Barrett Wendell. He left college, indeed, at the end of his sophomore year. Though Edwin Arlington Robinson and I were both in the Class of 1895 at Harvard, I never knew him as an undergraduate. ![]()
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