Here at The New York Sun, we’ve been pushing to have Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) remembered as the major American poet he was. And so our Poem of the Day feature has already presented Robinson’s “Mr. Flood’s Party,” “Luke Havergal,” and “Miniver Cheevy.” Today, however, we add a Robinson poem not so much to talk about E.A. Robinson as to introduce the subject of his poem: the underappreciated George Crabbe (1754–1832).

A Suffolk clergyman and doctor who moved to London in 1780 to attempt a literary career, Crabbe was taken up by Edmund Burke, who discovered him living in poverty and found a living for him. Crabbe’s 1812 poetic “Tales” received some critical notice, but his admirers tended to be other writers rather than general readers. It seemed at the time to take a writer’s eye to recognize the skill that Crabbe displayed in such long poems as “The Village” (1782) and “The Borough” (1810).

Appreciation of the poet has remained much the same through the long years after his death. Down to our own day, typically only his fellow poets and a handful of critics make the case for George Crabbe as a classic writer of English verse. The trouble is that Crabbe took the grand aloofness of the heroic couplet — but used it to express a realism about the working class and the life of the land.

There was a hard core to the man’s work, a stern eye’s unblinkingness, that E.A. Robinson points to in his sonnet for Crabbe, today’s Poem of the Day. “Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,” Robinson opens his sonnet, and “In books that are as altars where we kneel / To consecrate the flicker, not the flame” he ends the poem, in a line as good as anything Robinson wrote. Tomorrow the Sun will run an extract from Crabbe’s “The Village,” but for now, appreciate what one real poet saw in another.

George Crabbe
by E.A. Robinson

Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will, —
But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still
With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.
In spite of all fine science disavows,
Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill
There yet remains what fashion cannot kill,
Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.

Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.
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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.