poet Edwin Arlington Robinson
Biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edwin Arlington Robinson poet
Edwin Arlington Robinson was an American poet who won three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
Biography
Robinson was born in Head Tide, Lincoln County, Maine, but his family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1870. He described his childhood in Maine as "stark and unhappy": his parents, having wanted a girl, did not name him until he was six months old, when they visited a holiday resort; other vacationers decided that he should have a name, and selected a man from Arlington, Massachusetts to draw a name out of a hat.
Robinson's early difficulties led many of his poems to have a dark pessimism and his stories to deal with "an American dream gone awry". His brother Dean died of a drug overdose. His other brother, Herman, a handsome and charismatic man, married the woman Edwin himself loved, but Herman suffered business failures, became an alcoholic, and ended up estranged from his wife and children, dying impoverished in a charity hospital in 1901. Robinson's poem "Richard Cory" is thought to refer to this brother.
In late 1891, at the age of 21, Edwin entered Harvard University as a special student. He took classes in English, French, and Shakespeare, as well as one on Anglo-Saxon that he later dropped. His mission was not to get all A's, as he wrote his friend Harry Smith, "B, and in that vicinity, is a very comfortable and safe place to hang".
His real desire was to get published in one of the Harvard literary journals. Within the first fortnight of being there, The Harvard Advocate published Robinson's "Ballade of a Ship". He was even invited to meet with the editors, but when he returned he complained to his friend Mowry Saben, "I sat there among them, unable to say a word". Robinson's literary career had false-started.
Edwin's father, Edward, died after Edwin's first year at Harvard. Edwin returned to Harvard for a second year, but it was to be his last one as a student there. Though short, his stay in Cambridge included some of his most cherished experiences, and there he made his most lasting friendships. He wrote his friend Harry Smith on June 21, 1893:
I suppose this is the last letter I shall ever write you from Harvard. The thought seems a little queer, but it cannot be otherwise. Sometimes I try to imagine the state my mind would be in had I never come here, but I cannot. I feel that I have got comparatively little from my two years, but still, more than I could get in Gardiner if I lived a century.
Robinson had returned to Gardiner by mid-1893. He had plans to start writing seriously. In October he wrote his friend Gledhill:
Writing has been my dream ever since I was old enough to lay a plan for an air castle. Now for the first time I seem to have something like a favorable opportunity and this winter I shall make a beginning.
With his father gone, Edwin became the man of the household. He tried farming and developed a close relationship with his brother's wife Emma Robinson, who after her husband Herman's death moved back to Gardiner with her children. She twice rejected marriage proposals from Edwin, after which he permanently left Gardiner. He moved to New York, where he led a precarious existence as an impoverished poet while cultivating friendships with other writers, artists, and would-be intellectuals. In 1896 he self-published his first book, The Torrent and the Night Before, paying 100 dollars for 500 copies. Robinson meant it as a surprise for his mother. Days before the copies arrived, Mary Palmer Robinson died of diphtheria.
His second volume, The Children of the Night, had a somewhat wider circulation. Its readers included President Theodore Roosevelt's son Kermit, who recommended it to his father. Impressed by the poems and aware of Robinson's straits, Roosevelt in 1905 secured the writer a job at the New York Customs Office. Robinson remained in the job until Roosevelt left office.
Gradually his literary successes began to mount. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times in the 1920s. During the last twenty years of his life he became a regular summer resident at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where several women made him the object of their devoted attention, but he maintained a solitary life and never married. Robinson died of cancer on April 6, 1935 in the New York Hospital (now New York Cornell Hospital) in New York City.
Recognition
Edwin Arlington Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry three times: in 1922 for his first Collected Poems, in 1925 for The Man Who Died Twice, and in 1928 for Tristram.
Edwin Arlington Robinson's Works:
Poetry
The Torrent and the Night Before (1896)
Luke Havergal (1897)
The Children of the Night (1897)
Richard Cory (1897)
Captain Craig and Other Poems (1902)
The Town Down the River (1910)
Miniver Cheevy (1910)
The Man Against the Sky (1916)
Merlin (1917)
Ben Trovato (1920)
The Three Taverns (1920)
Avon's Harvest (1921)
Collected Poems (1921)
Haunted House (1921)
Roman Bartholomew (1923)
The Man Who Died Twice (1924)
Dionysus in Doubt (1925)
Tristram (1927)
Fortunatus (1928)
Sonnets, 1889-1917 (1928)
Cavender's House (1929)
Modred (1929)
The Glory of the Nightingales (1930)
Matthias at the Door (1931)
Selected Poems (1931)
Talifer (1933)
Amaranth (1934)
King Jasper (1935)
Collected Poems (1937)
Plays
Van Zorn (1914)
The Porcupine (1915)
Letters
Selected Letters (1940)
Untriangulated Stars: Letters to Harry de Forest Smith 1890-1905 (1947)
Edwin Arlington Robinson's Letters to Edith Brower (1968)
Miscellany
Uncollected Poems and Prose (1975)
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Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edwin Arlington Robinson (22 December 1869 – 6 April 1935 / Maine / United States)
poet Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edwin Arlington Robinson Poems
Search in the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson :
Order By Title Order By Date Added Order By Hit New Poems
1. Haunted House 4/19/2016
2. Why He Was There 11/26/2014
3. Horace To Leuconoë 1/3/2003
4. Tasker Norcross 1/3/2003
5. Momus 1/3/2003
6. The Return Of Morgan And Fingal 1/3/2003
7. Erasmus 1/3/2003
8. Fragment 1/3/2003
9. Job The Rejected 1/3/2003
10. The Old King's New Jester 1/3/2003
11. Lazarus 1/3/2003
12. Demos 1/3/2003
13. Nimmo 1/3/2003
14. Inferential 1/3/2003
15. Leffingwell 1/3/2003
16. Lingard And The Stars 1/3/2003
17. Llewellyn And The Tree 1/3/2003
18. Isaac And Archibald 1/3/2003
19. Lisette And Eileen 1/3/2003
20. Rahel To Varnhagen 1/3/2003
21. Theophilus 1/3/2003
22. The Sunken Crown 1/3/2003
23. L'Envoy 1/3/2003
24. Discovery 1/3/2003
25. The New Tenants 1/3/2003
26. Lost Anchors 1/3/2003
27. The Whip 1/3/2003
28. The Altar 1/3/2003
29. The Revealer 1/3/2003
30. Recalled 1/3/2003
31. For Some Poems By Matthew Arnold 1/3/2003
32. The Chorus Of Old Men In Aegus 1/3/2003
33. The Klondike 1/3/2003
34. Clavering 1/3/2003
35. Two Octaves 1/3/2003
36. The Book Of Annandale 1/3/2003
37. The Pilot 1/3/2003
38. The Corridor 1/3/2003
39. But For The Grace Of God 1/3/2003
40. The Gift Of God 1/3/2003
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poet Edwin Arlington Robinson
A Happy Man - Poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson
When these graven lines you see,
Traveller, do not pity me;
Though I be among the dead,
Let no mournful word be said.
Children that I leave behind,
And their children, all were kind;
Near to them and to my wife,
I was happy all my life.
My three sons I married right,
And their sons I rocked at night;
Death nor sorrow never brought
Cause for one unhappy thought.
Now, and with no need of tears,
Here they leave me, full of years,--
Leave me to my quiet rest
In the region of the blest.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
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An Old Story - Poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Strange that I did not know him then.
That friend of mine!
I did not even show him then
One friendly sign;
But cursed him for the ways he had
To make me see
My envy of the praise he had
For praising me.
I would have rid the earth of him
Once, in my pride...
I never knew the worth of him
Until he died.
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Miniver Cheevy - Poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of the warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam's neighbors.
Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
Mininver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the medieval grace
Of iron clothing.
Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
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