Avon's Harvest

"In ""Avon's Harvest,"" Edwin Arlington Robinson devotes the majority of the book to one long narrative poem of the same title, which tells the story of how a man's life was destroyed by the slow canker of an unreasoning hatred he formed as a young man, and of a sudden act of violence that flared out of it. Robinson's wields his sparse, simple, yet brilliantly polished verse like a scalpel, dissecting layer after layer of Avon's mind until the whole is laid bare as if on an operating table. The rest of the book includes a number of short poems, most particularly the famous ""Mr. Flood's Party,"" in which an old man's courage, fortified with liquor, suffices to get him home yet one more night. "