Tristram
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Summary
Tristram is the third and final panel of a trilogy Edwin Arlington Robinson built out of Arthurian legend, following Merlin in 1917 and Lancelot in 1920, and it retells the story of the knight Tristram and his love for Isolt of Ireland, a woman promised to his uncle, King Mark, set against Tristram's own eventual marriage to a second woman who shares her name, Isolt of the White Hands. Robinson tells the story in long, supple passages of blank verse that stay close to the lovers' interior experience rather than to battle or court incident, treating the old material less as adventure than as a sustained case study in obsession, divided loyalty and the particular grief of loving two people at once without being able to fully choose between them.
Where a more conventional retelling might dwell on the romance's more spectacular episodes, Robinson keeps the poem's attention on the psychological weather inside his characters, the guilt, the jealousy and the slow ruin that obsession brings down on people who by any ordinary measure had a claim to nobility and honor. That approach, applying a modern, skeptical psychology to material usually handled as pure romance, connects Tristram directly to the failed lives and inward shadows that run through Robinson's Tilbury Town poems, even though the setting here is legendary rather than contemporary New England.
Reading Tristram means moving slowly through long stretches of interior meditation rather than fast moving incident, and it rewards a reader already familiar with Robinson's psychological method from his shorter poems, now given a much larger, more famous story to work on. It suits anyone drawn to Arthurian material treated with genuine modern seriousness rather than as costume romance.
Historical Context & Significance
Edwin Arlington Robinson won his third Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1928 for Tristram, completing a run that had begun with Collected Poems in 1922 and continued with The Man Who Died Twice in 1925, three wins in seven years, a record that stood until Robert Frost took his third prize in 1937.
Tristram was, unusually for a book of poetry, a genuine commercial success, selling well enough in the general market to make Robinson briefly a widely read author rather than a poet known mainly within literary circles, a rare outcome for narrative verse in an era when prose fiction otherwise dominated popular reading. The book completed the Arthurian trilogy Robinson had begun with Merlin in 1917 and continued with Lancelot in 1920, closing out his sustained engagement with the legend after more than a decade of returning to it.