Eros Turannos

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1914

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Cultural Context: Psychological Realism

In examining the complicated inner world of a middle-aged woman struggling with accommodating the reality of an empty and unrewarding love life, Edwin Arlington Robinson creates a portrait of a character whose motivations are at once evident and mysterious, simple and complex.

In this, the poem reflects the massive early-20th-century cultural influence of the controversial theories about behavior and motivation of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), which were then shaping the burgeoning field of psychology. Behavior, Freud argued, is complicated, and conscious decision-making is motivated by the subconscious ramifications of past experiences.

Robinson’s poem approaches its main character like a psychologist poring over a case study. The poem examines the woman objectively from three points of view: She speaks first, then the town, and then the speaker. This collective examination from different perspectives in the end yields no tidy explanation about the woman’s psychological makeup. That uncertainty, at once rewarding and futile, revealing and frustrating, intriguing and self-defeating, reflects Freud’s insights in to the complicated nature of human behavior.

Literary Context: Local-Color Realism

Before the work of late-19th-century American literary realists, small-town America was held in idealistic reverence in fiction. Writers sentimentalized rural life, evoking nostalgia even as young people fled the country for cities and the threat of urban expansion threatened to render small towns a thing of the past. This portrayal rendered small-town life idyllic: neighbors waving in greeting, families going to church and praying together, work rewarding and fulfilling, children following happily in the template of their parents.

Robinson, however, was able to draw on actual lived experiences for his depictions of residents of rural communities. His small-town coastal New England upbringing showed him a far different world. Before Robinson turned his attention to revisiting the larger-than-life legends of Arthurian England, his poems reflected his fascination with people whose emotional lives were shaped (and sometimes twisted) by the pressures of small-town life.

Like other contemporary writers—including Edgar Lee Masters, who wrote the poetry collection Spoon River Anthology (1915), Sherwood Anderson and his Winesburg, Ohio (1919) short story cycle, Hamlin Garland, who wrote stories of the prairie, and fellow Maine resident Sarah Orne Jewett, who created sketches of New England life—Robinson created Tilbury Town, a fictional New England coastal town where he could explore the quiet desperation and small tragedies of its residents—among them the woman in “Eros Turannos.”

Robinson, much like his contemporaries, took a harsh view of small-town life. His Tilbury Town characters reflect lost hopes, thwarted ambitions, the oppressive impact of vindictive gossip and rumor, the impossibility of escape, the smug hypocrisy of neighbors, the drudgery of work, the hypocrisy of church-going, the settling-in to family living uncomplicated by passion, and ultimately the welcome release of death.