When nature became inhospitable to spirit for Robinson, he recognized that man, if he stands upright at all, stands alone; he is the only instance of spirit and therefore the only evidence of its nature and destiny. When self-knowledge cannot come through communication with nature, man must turn inward or to his kind—to introspection or to what is "between man and man." With nature dead, man must open himself to man, to his spiritual being mirrored in his own reflection or the fate of others. For this reason Robinson’s immediate subject is man. Nowhere does he announce this fact in so many words, yet there can be no doubt about it, his entire poetic work being cogent testimony of it. Judging from his titles alone—for example, "Luke Havergal," "Eben Flood" . . . .

Correspondingly, as he became more sophisticated about truth, he became more intent upon, and more proficient at, cultivating obscurity. Like Howells, and in accordance with the interests of realism, he regarded his work in the early stage of his career as largely "an attempt to show the poetry of the commonplace." Though his theory and practice were in some ways as incongruent as Wordsworth’s in Lyrical Ballads, he sought, nevertheless, to make poetry out of, or to find poetry in, the real as he understood it at this time—things as they visually are. Consequently, his early poems at their best tended to be tight, succinct, sharp, concrete, lucid, vivid, exact. Poems like "Flammonde," "Richard Cory," "Eben Flood," though each in different ways, derive their power from concreteness, from clarity achieved through sharp observation. Instead of practice resulting in greater concreteness and vividness, which might seem the logical and customary course, he became progressively more obscure, until in the late long poems his narratives are so dimly motivated and tortuously plotted that it is a major task just to determine what happens in them. These poems are in no way devoted to the poetry of the commonplace, and as a consequence the language in them becomes relatively dissociated from things seen, actual speech, and concrete situations. Passionate, long-winded talk; general, abstract diction; relatively formal, "high-toned" syntax; circumlocution and rhetoric become in them the hallmarks of Robinson’s style.