Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edwin
Arlington Robinson, (b. Dec. 22, 1869,
Head Tide, Maine, U.S.—d. April 6, 1935,
New York, N.Y.), American poet who is
best known for his short dramatic poems
concerning the people in a small New
England village, Tilbury Town, very much
like the Gardiner, Maine, in which he
grew up.
After
his family suffered financial reverses,
Robinson cut short his attendance at
Harvard University (1891–93) and
returned to Gardiner to stay with his
family, whose fortunes were
disintegrating. The lives of both his
brothers ended in failure and early
death, and Robinson’s poetry is much
concerned with personal defeat and the
tragic complexities of life. Robinson
himself endured years of poverty and
obscurity before his poetry began to
attract notice.
His
first book, The Torrent and the Night
Before, was privately printed at his own
expense. His subsequent collections, The
Children of the Night (1897) and The
Town Down the River (1910), fared little
better, but the publication of The Man
Against the Sky (1916) brought him
critical acclaim. In these early works
his best poetic form was the dramatic
lyric, as exemplified in the title poem
of The Man Against the Sky, which
affirms life’s meaning despite its
profoundly dark side. During these years
Robinson perfected the poetic form for
which he became so well known: a
structure based firmly on stanzas,
skillful rhyming patterns, and a precise
and natural diction, combined with a
dramatic examination of the human
condition. Among the best poems of this
period are “Richard Cory,” “Miniver
Cheevy,” “For a Dead Lady,” “Flammonde,”
and “Eros Turannos.” Robinson broke with
the tradition of late Romanticism and
introduced the preoccupations and plain
style of naturalism into American
poetry. His work attracted the attention
of President Theodore Roosevelt, who
gave him a sinecure at the U.S. Customs
House in New York (held from 1905 to
1909).
In the
second phase of his career, Robinson
wrote longer narrative poems that share
the concern of his dramatic lyrics with
psychological portraiture. Merlin
(1917), the first of three long
blank-verse narrative poems based on the
King Arthur legends, was followed by
Lancelot (1920) and Tristram (1927).
Robinson’s Collected Poems appeared in
1921. The Man Who Died Twice (1924) and
Amaranth (1934) are perhaps the most
often acclaimed of his later narrative
poems, though in general these works
suffer in comparison to the early
dramatic lyrics. Robinson’s later short
poems include “Mr. Flood’s Party,” “Many
Are Called,” and “The Sheaves.”
