Eros Turannos

Much like his contemporary Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson did not embrace the experimental open verse favored by Walt Whitman, the dominant poet of post–Civil War America. Frost and Robinson disliked Whitman’s abandonment of the tight patterns of traditional rhythm and rhyme because they believed in shaping words into the subtle music of prosody. 

“Eros Turannos” reflects Robinson’s respect for the formal traditions of the ancient poets and the British Romantics he admired in his youth. The poem is built around 6 octaves (stanzas with eight lines). Each stanza follows the same ABABCCCB rhyme scheme, a rigid pattern that suggests the rigidly conventional morality that characterizes the townspeople in Stanza 4 and makes the woman feel like she has a dearth of choices in the face of her loveless relationship.  

The poem structure contrasts the formless ambiguity of the woman’s agonies—the reader sees her exactly from the outside, but cannot learn the truth about how the man betrayed her or why she stays. Robinson’s tightly chiseled, carefully patterned lines echo the dilemma of the woman, locked up to suffer unknown within the neat streets of her New England