WATSON, Robert (Winthrop)

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Nationality: American. Born: Passaic, New Jersey, 26 December 1925. Education: Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, B.A. 1946; University of Zurich (Swiss-American Exchange Fellow), 1947; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, M.A. 1950, Ph.D. in English 1955. Military Service: U.S. Naval Reserve, 1943–45. Family: Married Elizabeth Ann Rean in 1952; one son and one daughter. Career: Instructor, Williams College, 1946, 1947–48, 1952–53, and Johns Hopkins University, 1950–52. Member of the faculty since 1953, and since 1963 professor of English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Visiting poet, California State University, Northridge, 1968–69. Awards: American Scholar prize, 1959; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1973; American Academy award, 1977. Address: 9-D Fountain Manor Drive, Greensboro, North Carolina 27405, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

A Paper Horse. New York, Atheneum, 1962.

Advantages of Dark. New York, Atheneum, 1966.

Christmas in Las Vegas. New York, Atheneum, 1971.

Watson on the Beach. Greensboro, North Carolina, SB Press, 1972.

Selected Poems. New York, Atheneum, 1974.

Island of Bones. Greensboro, North Carolina, Unicorn Press, 1977.

Night Blooming Cactus. New York, Atheneum, 1980.

The Pendulum, New and Selected Poems. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

Play

A Plot in the Palace, in First Stage (Lafayette, Indiana), 1964.

Novels

Three Sides of the Mirror. New York, Putnam, 1966.

Lily Lang. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1977.

Other

Editor, with Gibbons Ruark, The Greensboro Reader. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1964.

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Manuscript Collection: Jackson Library, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Critical Studies: By Thomas Lask in New York Times, 11 December 1971; by Grover Smith, in Above Ground Review (Arden, North Carolina), winter 1971; by Sister Bernetta Quinn, in Georgia Review (Athens), fall 1977; by James Finn Cotter, in Hudson Review (New York), summer 1981; "Robert Watson Issue" of Greensboro Review (North Carolina), summer 1989; "Robert Watson: Everything We Cannot See Is Here," in Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poetry by Henry Taylor, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Robert Watson comments:

I am primarily a poet, but in my spare time I also enjoy writing fiction and drama. Though I have written some criticism and reviews, I write informative prose only at the point of a gun.

With few exceptions, the statements made by poets in our time about their work seem pretentious, silly, boring, or all three at once. Theories get much attention, more than the poems from which they come; no theories for me. And if I try to detail characteristics of my poetry, then I am writing my obituary. In vague terms I try to make my work as musical (in the poetic sense), alive, and intimate as I can and try to get in the way people feel about their lives and their world. I do dramatic, lyric, and narrative poems in a wide variety of forms, most of my own invention. What does not seem to fit poems I put in prose fiction.

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Robert Watson's poetry is energetic and economical, splendidly suited to the difficult art of creating characters in verse. Watson's first book, A Paper Horse, established these facts with far more authority and consistency than is usual in first collections. The book demonstrates a mastery of staccato compression in a variety of formal approaches that range from free verse to strict rhyme and meter. Most of the poems are soliloquies by a variety of characters particularly qualified to speak of the loss of youth, freedom, or love. The surface bleakness of the characters' lives is mitigated by Watson's compassion for them and by his strong and distinctive style.

Watson's style has a density of texture that is nevertheless accessible, for he uses what sounds like the language of real speech in compressed syntactical arrangements. He often places repetitive parallel clauses so that essential grammatical elements, such as subjects, can be omitted without loss of clarity. When this method is combined with a strongly audible metrical pattern, the results include distinctive but plausible speech and unusual power.

Watson's style remains much the same in Advantages of Dark, but the collection extends the range of starting points for his poetry. In addition to soliloquies, there are a number of satires of contemporary life, some of which portray with harrowing humor the willful recalcitrance of everyday inanimate objects. The book also contains an ambitious long poem, "The City of Passaic," that uses the lives of a number of its inhabitants to evoke the life of the city where Watson was born. "Lines for a President" also deserves mention as one of the very few convincing and genuine American poems on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Christmas in Las Vegas is something of a return to the bleakness of A Paper Horse. In his accustomed style, which suddenly appears to have been developed for just this purpose, Watson explores the brittle brilliance of modern urban life, in which people are almost indistinguishable from the machines that have enslaved them. The somber tones of this collection, paradoxically deepened by the relentless presence of artificial light, are more profound than any Watson had previously struck.

Love and the apparent perversity of the external world are only two of the recurrent themes in Watson's shorter poems. Others, such as the seductiveness of self-delusion, the related conviction that elsewhere is better than here, or the difficulty of locating the boundary between life and death, turn up not only in the short poems but also in the several longer ones, ranging roughly between 80 and 240 lines, that have constituted an important part of each of Watson's collections. Since the appearance of "Watson on the Beach" in his first book and of the aforementioned "City of Passaic," Watson has continued to explore the possibilities of this difficult form, as in "Victoria Woodhull," a superb characterization of a historical personage, and in "Island of Bones," collected in Night Blooming Cactus. Set in Key West and more fragmentary in structure than most of Watson's earlier poems, "Island of Bones" is a sturdy and absorbing reminder of Watson's continuing restlessness and invention.

—Henry Taylor