Poem of the Day: ‘Mr. Flood’s Party’

We know Edwin Arlington Robinson as the poet of struggle and failure, whose personae, in poem after poem, possess a singular genius for self-destruction.

Via Wikimedia Commons
An old man drinking beer, detail of photograph by William B. Edwards. Via Wikimedia Commons

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) received the first-ever Pulitzer Prize in poetry, for his Collected Poems in 1921. Fame is fleeting, but even in his own lifetime Robinson was something of an oddball: solitary (despite his friendship with Teddy Roosevelt), often poor, dedicated to unfashionably traditional rhymed and metered forms when his contemporaries were embracing free verse as the American poetic idiom. We know him as the poet of struggle and failure, whose personae, in poem after poem, possess a singular genius for self-destruction.  

Take, for example, Eben Flood, whose very name suggests a tide gone out and whose homecoming party is a party of one. Robinson’s rhymed pentameter octets sketch his scene, a drunkard offering himself another drink by the light of the moon. The town below, holding “as much as he should ever know / On earth again of home,” sleeps on, all its doors locked to Eben, who in “times long past,” as his drinking song proclaims, had found it full of friends. Now, although he keeps company bravely enough with the moon and himself and his jug, his one companion in the end, as in the psalm, is darkness.

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