The rare poet to succeed critically and financially, Edwin Arlington Robinson rejected the twentieth century’s liberalized verse forms. His diverse application of traditional forms to the close-clipped, unconsciously cynical character study distinguished him in an era of rash experimentation. Only Robert Frost surpassed Robinson in Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes. Skilled at creating sustained ironies, Robinson preserved the best in nineteenth- century rationalism and respect for the individual—in particular, losers who cope daily with failure and falter without having attained their full potential. To criticism that his poetry was exceedingly depressing, he cryptically replied, “The world is . . . a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”
Robinson was born in Head Tide, Maine, on December 22, 1869, and his poetry reflects the tastes and outlook of the New Englanders of Gardiner, where he grew up. A writer from age 11, he excelled at Latin and English. However, in 1893, after two years at Harvard, Robinson no longer had the money to stay in school and returned home to care for his ailing father. Following his father’s death and a brother’s mismanagement of family funds, he settled among family to write and play his violin and clarinet.
Robinson was distraught after the death of his mother from diphtheria in 1896 and left Maine permanently. He worked briefly at Harvard as a secretary and as a subway agent in New York City, then resettled in Peterborough, New Hampshire, at the MacDowell artist colony, where he stayed until 1935. His self-publication, The Torrent and the Night Before (1896), reissued as The Children of the Night (1897), demonstrates a gripping, dramatic seriousness, particularly in “Richard Cory” and “Luke Havergal,” two of his more frequently anthologized and recited poems. Robinson’s blank verse, influenced by his celibacy, agnosticism, binge drinking, and withdrawal from friends, showcases his pervasive distrust of humanity.
A turning point for Robinson occurred with Captain Craig (1902), which he wrote while living in midtown Manhattan. The volume found favor with President Theodore Roosevelt, who offered Robinson first a consular post in Mexico, then a job at the New York Custom House. For four years, Robinson lived in a Greenwich Village townhouse and profited from the undemanding customhouse post, which gave him time to rewrite and refine spare verbal portraits that became his trademark. He served on the Poet’s Guild with Robert Frost, Edwin Markham, and Vachel Lindsay and wrote full time from 1910 until his death in 1935.
Robinson, who was influenced by Thomas Hardy’s romanticism and the naturalism of Emile Zola, refused to freelance, teach, or otherwise lower his literary standards. While living in Staten Island, New York, he completed two plays, Van Zorn (1914) and The Porcupine (1915). He lived off an inheritance and trust fund while earning three Pulitzer Prizes for poetry for Collected Poems (1922), The Man Who Died Twice (1925), and a trilogy, Lancelot (1920), Tristram (1927), and Modred (1929), a popular verse narrative that restates romantic situations from Arthurian lore. In addition, Robinson received acclaim for The Town Down the River (1910), which he dedicated to Roosevelt, The Man Against the Sky (1916), The Three Taverns (1920), source of “Mr. Flood’s Party,” and the biography of a hate-driven man, Avon’s Harvest (1921), which the poet once characterized as a “dime novel in verse.” In all, he published twenty-eight works.
After his death from stomach cancer at a New York Hospital on April 6, 1935, Robinson was cremated, his ashes interred in Gardiner, and a plaque erected on Church Square commemorating his writings about Tilbury Town. Posthumous works include King Jasper (1935), an allegory of the Industrial Age he proofread only hours before his death; an anthology, Collected Poems, issued in 1937; and Selected Letters (1940), a glimpse into his private, self-concealing correspondence. His papers are housed at the University of New Hampshire.
