Wonderful post, Edmund. It's nice - for me, at least - to get so educated by
the paragraph full!
This whole notion of 'the cast out' and finding ways to negotiate from that
position in terms of making a 'residence in the writing' - whether it be on
an island (in reality or one's imagination), and/or, as a wanderer, or urban
flaneur - pose interesting possibilities, as well as the diverse literary
histories to which you point. (How to talk to angels while you are 'on the
run.'??)    
These themes of exile in contradistinction to communal notions of utopia,
or, alternatively, feet to the ground pragmatic group approaches to a
perpetually provisional/changing 'fragmented' reality. As we have, for
example, with Dewey and the Objectivists in poetry.

Definitely all food for my thinking here, and compelling me to look more on
my own takes and works with Walking.

Thanks,

Stephen Vincent

> hi Stephen, Roger -
> 
>> When I first read the Robinson poems in the Sixties I found that isolation
>> self-serving, disturbing, off-putting and antithetical to the communal
>> political aspirations of the time. Definitely counter-populist - and yet,
>> as an American westerner - creepily familiar.
> 
> 
> Rather as I would read & react to Larkin's Mr Bleaney's Room (a much simpler
> and more boring poem than Kees' Robinsons, I think)- more with an
> ethnographic eye than a reading-enjoyment - but here is the absent named one
> not known - though Larkin can't help being sly and wink-wink, trying to
> co-opt us in to one viewpoint: But the great melancholy of aloneness with a
> God too far away is here too, only now God is too high up in the high
> windows to even be feasible. Creepily familiar, but differently.
> 
>> It will be interesting to see if there's a direct connection between Defoe
>> and Ibn Tufail. Is there a history of such literature in the Islamic world?
> 
> I suspect the connection has been subject to academic scrutiny - it's a
> connection drawn more often in Arabic commentaries. The third Crusoe work,
> comprehensively titled "Serious reflections during the Life and Surprising
> adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with his Vision of the Angelic World" gets
> closest to the "journeying soul" of Ibn Tufail whose character Hai bin
> Yaqzan translates as Alive, son of Awake.
> 
> The philosophical romance flourished for hundreds of years in Islamic
> literatures - and in great diversity - My knowledge is too scatty to surmise
> what Ibn Tufail's (full name Abu Bakr bin Abd al-Malik bin Muhammad bin
> Muhammad bin Tufayl al-Qaisi, known in the medieval West as Abubacer, born
> in Granada in 1100, died in marrakesh 1185) sources are, though the
> immediate context is that the work argues against al-Ghazali's Destruction
> of the Philosophers through a striking variation on a story by Ibn Sina
> (Avicenna) which tells of a princess's son cast onto an equatorial island.
> 
> Ibn Tufail's work was one of a number of these philosophical romances &
> "assemblies" taken up in post-Napoleon  Egypt as models for the development
> of an "Arabic novel". Interestingly, Robinson Crusoe was one of the first
> Western novels to be translated into Arabic, c.1800, a good fifty years
> before the movement to translate Western novels took off. More recently, Ibn
> Tufail and his Hai bin Yaqzan has had a marked influence on a number of Arab
> women novelists - crude generalisations: sensing a character outside, who
> must always begin again?, spontaneously generated & so un-sexed? - I'd
> recommend Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat's The Stone of Laughter (Hajar
> al-Dahk) - (it has an excellent translation by Sophie Bennett from Garnet
> Publishing) - which is a novel about an androgynous young man Khalil living
> in Beirut at war, attracted to an asocial Robinson-mode, as the city is
> reduced to remote islands of life cut off from each other.
> 
> Edmund