¹ Untriangulated Stars: Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson to Harry de Forest Smith, 1890–1905, edited by Denham Sutcliffe (Cambridge, Mass., 1947). Quotations from this volume are generally identified by the dates of the letters in which they appear.

² Edwin Arlington Robinson (Minneapolis, 1962), p. 11.

³ Robinson makes the comment in a letter to Arthur R. Gledhill: Selected Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson, edited by Ridgely Torrence (New York, 1940), p. 11. See also p. 50. Friends such as William Vaughn Moody regarded his character as “mortuary.”

⁴ Except as noted otherwise, all quotations of Robinson's early poetry follow the texts of the first editions of The Torrent and the Night Before and The Children of the Night; A Book of Poems as reproduced in Edwin Arlington Robinson, Selected Early Poems and Letters, edited by Charles T. Davis (New York, 1960).

⁵ Craig is poor and an outcast, as was Robinson at the time he wrote the poem. Of course, Craig's material circumstance is of negligible importance except in a symbolic way: he has rejected materialism and is rejected by a materialistic society. Thus one could say that he is as much like Christ (see ll. 1072 ff.) as he is like Robinson or—for that matter—Alfred Louis. With regard to character, Craig seems equally, except for his garrulity, a self-portrait. In “Early Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson,” Virginia Quarterly Review, xiii (Winter-Autumn 1937), 57, Daniel Gregory Mason describes Robinson in a way that very aptly applies to Craig: “Admirable, all through this time [when he was ”distressingly poor“], was his half serene, half humorous detachment from his surroundings.” The two articles that deal with Louis—Denham Sutcliffe, “The Original of Robinson's Captain Craig,” New England Quarterly, xvi (September 1943), 407–431; and Robert W. Hill, “More Light on a Shadowy Figure,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, lx (August 1956), 373–377—have nothing to say on the point.

⁶ See, for example, the early review in the Nation, lxxv (1902), 463; Harriet Monroe, Poets and Their Art (New York, 1932), pp. 3–5; and Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska, A History of American Poetry (1900–1940) (New York, 1946), pp. 119–121. Robinson's preoccupation with success-in-failure and failure-in-success has ambiguities connected with those with which this article is concerned, and in Captain Craig they have occasionally fostered misunderstanding. Harriet Monroe, writing her discussion of the poem around 1924 and bringing to bear on it her own temporarily pessimistic outlook, thinks that Robinson is rightly arguing that success is impossible in human life; in the same book, pp. 100–105, but six years later, she rejects the validity of the despair that she sees in The Waste Land. Louis Coxe, p. 24, refuses to identify Craig with Robinson, but he does not argue the issue. Evidence that suggests their single identity is given in nn. 5 and 7, and in the parallel passages quoted in the discussion below.

⁷ T. S. Eliot's The Three Voices of Poetry (Cambridge, England, 1954) can be usefully applied to Captain Craig to show that it is characteristically in the voice of the poet addressing an audience. Robinson's avoidance of dialogue in the poem—perhaps a reflection of a difficulty in writing convincing dialogue (a difficulty that he transforms into an artistic principle in letters to Smith, Untriangulated Stars, pp. 205, 210)—precludes, according to Eliot, the creation of voice and character distinct from the poet's own. Robinson's sending the narrator on a trip and having him return only in time for Craig to die are transparent devices that enable the poem to proceed via letters and testament rather than dialogue. There is a nice irony here: the non-stop talker Craig has no more a voice of his own than a latter-day cousin such as the hero of Wallace Stevens' The Comedian as the Letter C, who never says a word. Even in Robinson's later poetry, in which there is dialogue aplenty, the situation does not seem to be significantly different. One infers from the tones of these poems that the speaking characters are perhaps always Robinson himself.

⁸ There are other changes of negligible importance—punctuation and capitalization—in the revised poem. In editions of the Collected Poems there is a further change: in line 11 Robinson reverts from that to the original the.

⁹ “E. A. Robinson's Principles and Practice of Poetry,” diss. (Univ. of Wisconsin, 1956), pp. 124, 126. Stevick's discussion in Ch. ii of Robinson's characteristic indirection of statement broadly supports the thesis of the present article.

¹⁰ Mathilde M. Parlett, “Robinson's ‘Luke Havergal’,” Explicator, iii (June 1945), item 57.

¹¹ Walter Gierasch, “Robinson's ‘Luke Havergal’,” Explicator, iii (October 1944), item 8; A. A. Raven, “Robinson's ‘Luke Havergal’,” Explicator, iii (December 1944), item 24.

¹² Edwin Arlington Robinson (Norfolk, Conn., 1946), p. 35.

¹³ Selected Letters, p. 30.

¹⁴ The following discussion makes some use of the discussions of Nordau by R. P. Adams, “The Failure of Edwin Arlington Robinson,” Tulane Studies in English, xi (1961), 131–134, and by Edwin S. Fussell, Edwin Arlington Robinson; The Literary Background of a Traditional Poet (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954), pp. 122–125.

¹⁵ Untriangulated Stars, pp. 168, 229, and ll. 1153 ff. in Captain Craig.

¹⁶ On Robinson's intellectual doubts see H. H. Waggoner, “E. A. Robinson and the Cosmic Chill,” New England Quarterly, xiii (March 1940), 65–84, and R. P. Adams (see n. 14) in his general discussion in his article, pp. 97–151. In the Virginia Quarterly Review, p. 53, Mason notes Robinson's “helplessness in practical affairs,” and Robinson himself, in a letter to Smith of 4 February 1894, expresses his unhappy awareness of the fact.

¹⁷ In editions of the Collected Poems Robinson made a few revisions in the poem, among them a change from “trust her” in the first stanza to “listen.” However, he retained “trust her” in the final stanza.

¹⁸ The situation may be more complex. Robinson was often concerned with love that is blind; and the suggestion of passion in Havergal's love may be meant to imply its similarity to the “blinded love” of the condemned man in “The Night Before” (l. 203). Had Havergal's love been purer, the death of his beloved would perhaps not have led him into thoughts of suicide. “John Evereldown,” a poem remarkably like “Luke Havergal” in both its imagery and idea, portrays a man “pointing away from the light” to “follow the women wherever they call.”

¹⁹ Raven in Explicator and Adams, pp. 130, 135.

²⁰ Selected Letters, p. 92.

²¹ How common Robinson's predicament must have been in his day can be seen by a glance at Robert Frost's early poems. There are the same extremes, the elevated moral tone in “A Prayer in Spring” and “Revelation” and the melancholy tone in “Ghost House” and “A Dream Pang.” The slight impudence in the last lines of the two former poems marks their chief difference from the eighth and final stanzas of “The Children of the Night.” Frost also undertook a fin de siècle exercise in “A Line-Storm Song.”

²² Adams' article is devoted to this argument.