The Meaning of Tilbury Town: Robinson as a Regional Poet

Abstract

EDWIN Arlington Robinson is a regionalist writer, if by a regionalist writer we mean one who through a large number of otherwise unrelated works creates the impression of a whole society inhabiting a specific place which can be identified with a particular part of a real country. One feels that a large number of Robinson's poems taken together implies an even larger whole, Tilbury Town, the home of a complete society permeated with a definable set of values which some of its members accept, and from which others deviate; furthermore, one recognizes in its values Tilbury Town's direct correspondence with aspects of northern New England at a certain stage of its history. One recognizes the place even though the words Tilbury Town appear in few of the poems; we know somehow that Richard Cory and Cliff Klingenhagen lived in the same place at the same time. Likewise there are no concrete references to a place in Miniver Cheevy, Aaron Stark, Lost Anchors, or Aunt Imogen which would justify Lawrance Thompson's including them in his collection of Tilbury Town poems;' such reference seldom occurs, yet few readers would dispute Thompson's choices in his collection. The social geography is clear. Robinson, then, is a regional poet, but in important respects he is different from other regionalists, Robert Frost, for example, or Thomas Hardy. Like them he again and again comes back in his poetry to a particular region, but the meaning he finds in his is much different from the meaning they find in theirs. My goal in this paper is to define what is specific about Robinson's kind of regionalism, and to contrast it with the sort of regionalism illustrated by Frost and Hardy.