“let boys want pleasure, and men
struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
and the servile to serve a leader and the dupes to be duped.
yours is not theirs.”
—
people who interviewed him said he became the words he wrote. skin roughened by the sun and saltwater, eyes grey like the stone that surrounded him— “it was one of the most uncanny and complete relationships between a man and his natural background that i know in literature.”
he was set apart through natural talent, but nature itself proved his path to glory. the california coast was his muse and maker.
much of robinson’s power lies in his conviction that unpredictability was not something to be feared. he accepted his smallness and his free will in the same breath.
robinson understood the elemental wildness that winds itself through us and the world at large— one of my favorite lines from him is this: “the tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me, older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.”
here, common words capture intimate knowledge— the shape of the body, the feeling of blood rushing— but in such a way that knits that knowledge into a broader fabric of mutual experience.
robinson had an uncanny sense of how we are all connected and how we reflect— in appearance and behavior—the natural world, much like his hero walt whitman.
our natural environment has been the subject of poetry and holy texts for time out of mind, and almost every ancient society roots its origin stories in the earth itself. robinson’s poetry deftly taps into this primordial tradition while weaving in themes of lust and violence, reminding one of the greek epics that he so admired.
robinson also found inspiration in nietzsche and was often labeled a nihilist, but i’d argue that’s a misnomer. while the moral reckonings of the twenties and thirties certainly bore their mark on his work, he had a kind of faith in nature, i think.
ultimately, he deemed himself a subscriber to inhumanism, “a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. ... [inhumanism] offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate, and envy.”
there is a certain continuation of this philosophy in the poetry of bukowksi, a skepticism and removal that coexisted with a reverence for certain kinds of beauty. in steinbeck, too, there is that deep love of the northern california coast that so captures the imagination.
in all of his literary children, though, there is a shared sense of that inimitable line: “yours is not theirs.” there are things that live on, beyond fame and past power, and robinsons’s poetry reminds us that those are what’s worth striving for.
