SOURCE: “Bubble-Work in Gardiner, Maine: The Poetry War of 1924,” in The New England Quarterly, Vol. LVII, No. 1, March, 1984, pp. 25-43.

In the following essay, Satterfield discusses the controversy surrounding poetic intention in Robinson’s sonnet, “New England.”

Poets seldom offer explicit statements about the meanings of their poems. Edwin Arlington Robinson, perhaps the most reticent of our New England poets, nonetheless took to the front page of his hometown weekly in 1924 to explain what he intended by a sonnet that had offended some of his townsmen. He thus presented us, as well as the citizens of Gardiner, Maine, with a classic opportunity to compare poetic intention and execution.

Gardiner in the mid-1920s did not look much like the movie set of a New England village; a manufacturing town producing paper and lumber, shoes and Kennebec River ice, it was more practical than picturesque. The townspeople, moreover, did...