Today’s Poem: Requiem

Reviving Robert Louis Stevenson

John Singer Sargent’s 1887 Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson (Wikimedia Commons)

He’s missing from the Norton Anthology of Poetry, his place in the chronology taken by . . . um, looks up the Table of Contents; ah, yes . . . Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) and her Statue of Liberty sonnet, “The New Colossus.” Harold Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language leaps from Byron to Housman. The 2006 Longman Anthology of Poetry steps over him. He just isn’t much placed in the tradition of English poetry any more.

Enough.

Poems Ancient and Modern

hereby devotes itself to the cause of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). Sure, he wasn’t the greatest poet. But there’s no sin in not being Milton or Wordsworth or Eliot, the world trembling at your touch. Some effort was made in the 1990s and early 2000s to restore his reputation, but that revival seems mostly to have sputtered out. We need to remember that Stevenson was fine, clever, and exact. A literature that can honor Emma Lazarus can surely find a spot at the table for…