🏝️ Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, & Edwin Arlington Robinson: My Top Favorite Poets

Why I love them + a great poem from each of them

I discovered Emily Dickinson as a teenager and quickly began devouring her poetry. Later on I also fell in love with Robert Frost. They’re still my top two, but I would now add a number three, whom I discovered in college: Edwin Arlington Robinson.

Here’s a very brief bit about why I like each of them, plus a great poem from each—because I feel like talking about them, and I have a few tiny minutes for doing so today!

Note: I have always preferred poets who work with the structures of rhyme and meter (though I certainly appreciate excellent free-verse poems), and these three use rhyme and meter exceedingly well, in my opinion.

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Emily Dickinson

I love Emily Dickinson’s unique perspectives and way of putting things. Sometimes she can be a bit hard to understand, but other times she just blows me away.

I have many favorite poems of hers, but this one well suits my purposes (and time scarcity) at the moment:

We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies—

The Heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the Cubits warp
For fear to be a King—

Her message in this poem deeply resonates with me. I find that I so easily slip into matching the energy, interests, and accomplishments of the people around me, rather than rising up higher, being stronger, and thinking bigger. I want to learn not to wait for life circumstances to force (“call”) me to rise up higher, like a hero; I want that to be “a daily thing”!

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Robert Frost

Frost (like Dickinson) writes about both nature and human life with depth of insight. Again, I have very many favorites of his, but here’s a short one I really like. It’s an irony-toned poem about people who don’t want to come out and say what they really mean, but want others to guess or infer it.

Revelation

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.

‘Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

I amuse myself with wondering who in Frost’s life (perhaps his wife?) spoke to him in riddles and then got frustrated with him for not having guessed what was meant.

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Edwin Arlington Robinson

I very much enjoy E.A.R.’s narrative style; he has some great story-poems about people and characters. But here’s a more broadly reflective one that always resonates with me, especially the part towards the end that I bolded.

The Clerks

I did not think that I should find them there
When I came back again; but there they stood,
As in the days they dreamed of when young blood
Was in their cheeks and women called them fair.
Be sure, they met me with an ancient air, —
And yes, there was a shop-worn brotherhood
About them; but the men were just as good,
And just as human as they ever were.

And you that ache so much to be sublime,
And you that feed yourselves with your descent,
What comes of all your visions and your fears?
Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.

I love this expression of grappling with the conflict between ego/vanity and the universal flattener that is Time.

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Thanks for sharing this moment of poetry-pleasure with me!