are amazingly conservative. Evidently, Kees did not feel the imperative of arrythmia so palpable among his less memorable peers, not to mention successors. The literary critic and biographer Ian Hamilton made a special of Kees's existential problem with writing and fame, quoting one of Kees's illustrious friends from his New York period: According to Alfred Kazin, Weldon Kees's ambition as a poet knew no bounds. He "desperately wanted to be famous", says Kazin, "to be 'up there', as he used to say, with Eliot, Pound and other stars in our firmament". This being so, one has to wonder why Weldon was not more of a hustler on his own behalf. So far as we know, he seems to have done very little in the way of careerist self-advancement—although, to judge from photographs, he was by no means short of vanity. Arrogant, embittered and melancholic, he waited for acclaim to come to him, but none of the three books he published in his lifetime made much of a mark. (One commentator has estimated that Kees sold a total of 1,000 copies of his works before he disappeared.) Anthony Lane, the film critic of The New Yorker, has also written in kind about Kees's enduring body of work, especially in regard to the Robinson poems: It is that single word "usual" that brings you up short and lets the poem fan out. It points not just to the regularity of Robinson's own days and years but to the engulfing possibility of a thousand Robinsons out there, in the subway and on the streets, all ticking their lives away like his soundless watch. The poem, entitled "Aspects of Robinson," is the portrait of the postwar man of affairs: neither laborer nor magnate, but holding steady—and, at first blush, looking purposeful—within the middle rank. He is everything that Weldon Kees dreaded, as well as everything that he suspected he ought to be. On October 23, 2012, Kathleen Rooney's novel-in-poems Robinson Alone was released, of which Donna Seaman from Booklist wrote: In an extraordinary act of identification, poet and essayist Rooney improvises on Kees' most haunting poems, a quartet featuring an alter ego named Robinson. Her loosely biographical, knowledgeably imaginative, and gorgeously atmospheric story in verse portrays Robinson as a dapper, talented, and bedeviled man who conceals his sorrows behind insouciance. Rooney weaves lines from Kees' writings into her bluesy, funny, and scorching lyrics as