Edwin Arlington Robinson

One of the most fertile major American poets of the twentieth century, Edwin Arlington Robinson is, ironic onlyy, topper remembered for only a handful of short metrical compositions, stated Robert gigabyte in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography. Fellow writer Amy Lowell declared in the unused York Times Book Review, Edwin Arlington Robinson is poetry. I can think of no other living writer who has so consistently dedicated his life to his work.Robinson is considered unique among American poets of his time for his devotion to his art he promulgated virtually nothing during his long career except poetry. The expense of Robinsons single-mindedness, sarin explained, was virtually everything else in life for which people strive, but it eventually won for him both fortune and fame, as well as a firm position in literary hi composition as Americas freshman important poet of the twentieth century. Robinson seemed destined for a career in business or the sciences. He w as the triad son of a wealthy New England merchant, a man who had little use for the fine arts. He was, however, encouraged in his poetic pursuits by a neighbor and wrote copiously, experimenting with verse translations from Greek and Latin poets.In 1891 Edward Robinson provided the funds to send his son to Harvard partly because the aspiring writer required medical treatment that could best be performed in Boston. There Robinson write outed somewhat poems in local innovativespapers and magazines and, as he posterior explained in a biographical piece published in Colophon, collected a pile of rejection slips that moldiness become been one of the largest and most comprehensive in literary hi accounting. Finally he decided to publish his poems himself, and contracted with Riverside, a vanity press, to produce The Torrent and The nighttime Before, named by and by the first and last poems in the disposition.In the poems of The Torrent and The Night Before, Robinson experiment ed with figure out poetic forms and explored themes that would characterize very much of his workthemes of personal failure, esthetic endeavor, materialism, and the inevitability of change, according to Gilbert. He to a fault established a style recognizably his own an bail to traditional forms at a time when most poets were experimenting with the genre (All his life Robinson strenuously objected to forego verse, Gilbert remarked, replying once when asked if he wrote it, No, I write badly enough as it is. ), and laconic, everyday speech. Robinson send out copies of The Torrent and The Night Before out to editors of journals and to writers who he thought might be sympathetic to his work, say Gilbert.Read alsoHow Powerful Do You Find Atticus Finchs Closing Speech?The chemical reaction was generally favorable, although perhaps the most significant fall over came from Harry Thurston Peck, who commented unfavorably in the Bookman on Robinsons bleak outlook and sense of humor. Pec k found Robinsons tone too grim for his tastes, face that the world is not beautiful to Robinson, but a prison-house. I am sorry that I have painted myself in such lugubrious colours, Robinson wrote in the next issue of the Bookman, responding to this criticism. The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell theology with the wrong blocks. Encouraged by the largely positive critical reaction, Robinson quickly produced a second manuscript, The Children of the Night, which was also published by a vanity press, a friend providing the necessary funds.Unfortunately, reviewers largely ignored it Gilbert suggests that they were commit off by the vanity imprint. In 1902, two friends persuaded the publisher Houghton Mifflin to publish Captain Craig, other book of Robinsons verse, by promising to subsidize part of the publishing costs. Captain Craigwas neither a popular nor a critical victor, and for severa l days Robinson neglected poetry, drifting from job to job in New York City and the Northeast.He took to drinking heavily, and for a time it seemed that he would, as Gilbert bewilder it, fall into permanent dissolution, as both his brothers had done. His whimsical Miniver Cheevy, Gilbert continued, the poem rough the malcontent new who yearned for the past glories of the chivalric age and who finally coughed, and called it fate/and kept on drinking, is presumably a peculiar self-portrait. Robinsons luck changed in 1904, when Kermit Roosevelt brought The Children of the Night to the attention of his father, President Theodore Roosevelt.Roosevelt not only persuaded Random augury to republish the book, but also reviewed it himself for the Outlook (I am not sure I see Luke Havergal, he said, but I am entirely sure that I like it), and obtained a sinecure for its originator at the New York Customs Housea post Robinson held until 1909. The two thousand dollar yearly stipend that went with the post provided Robinson with financial security. In 1910, he repaid his debt to Roosevelt in The Town down the River, a collection of poems dedicated to the former president.Perhaps the best known of Robinsons poems are those now called the Tilbury Town cycle, named after the small town that provides the setting for many of his poems and explicitly links him and his poetry with small-town New England, the repressive, utilitarian favorable climate customarily designated as the Puritan ethic, explained W. R. Robinson in Edwin Arlington Robinson A Poetry of the Act. These poems also expound some of Robinsons most characteristic themes his curiosity, as Gerald DeWitt Sanders and his fellow editors put it in Chief current Poets of Britain and America, about what lies behind the social mask of character, and is dark hints about sexuality, loyalty, and mans terrible will to worst himself. Tilbury Town is first mentioned in John Evereldown, a ballad collected in The Torrent and The Night Before. John Evereldown, out late at night, is called back to the house by his wife, who is wondering why he wants to walk the long cold miles into town. He responds, God knows if I pray to be done with it all/But Gods no friend of John Evereldown. /So the clouds may come and the precipitate may fall,/the shadows may creep and the dead men crawl,/But I follow the women wherever they call,/And thats why Im going to Tilbury Town. Tilbury Town reappears at intervals throughout Robinsons work. The title poem in Captain Craig concerns an old resident of the town whose life, believed wasted by his neighbors, proves to have been of value.The Children of the Night contains the story of Richard Cory, a gentleman from sole to crown,/Clean favored, and imperially slim, who one calm summer night,/Went home and put a bullet through his head, and Tilbury Town itself is personified in the lines In fine, we thought that he was everything/ To make us wish that we were in his place. T he Man against the Skyaccording to Gilbert, Robinsons most important single volume, and in all likelihood his most critically acclaimedincludes the story of the man Flammonde, one of the poets most anthologized Tilbury verses. Despite the fact that much of Robinsons verse dealt with failed lives, several critics see his work as life-affirming. May Sinclair, writing an early review of Captain Craig for the Fortnightly Review, said of the Captain, He, ragged, old, and starved, challenges his friends to have courage and to rejoice in the sun.Amy Lowell, in her Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, stated, I have spoken of Mr. Robinsons unconscious cynicism. It is unconscious because he never dwells upon it as such, never delights in it, nor wraps it comfortably about him. It is hardly more than the reverse of the shield of pain, and in his later work, it gives place to a great, pitying tenderness. Success through Failure, that is the motto on the other side of his banner of Courage. And Robert rhyme, in his introduction to Robinsons King Jasper, declared, His theme was unhappiness itself, but his skill was as adroit as it was playful. There is that comforting thought for those who suffered to see him suffer. Many Tilbury Town verses were among the poems Robinson included in his Pulitzer Prize-winning smooth Poems of 1922the first Pulitzer ever awarded for poetry. He won his second poetry Pulitzer in 1924, this time for The Man Who Died Twice, the story of a street musician whose one musical masterpiece is lost when he collapses after a night of debauchery.Gilbert attributed the poems success to its combination of down-to-earth diction, classical allusion, and understated humor. In 1927, Robinson again won a Pulitzer for his long narrative poem Tristram, one in a series of poems based on Arthurian legends. Tristram proved to be Robinsons only true popular successit was that rarity of twentieth-century literature, a best-selling book-length poemand it rec eived critical acclaim as well. It may be said not only that Tristram is the finest of Mr. Robinsons narrative poems, wrote Lloyd Morris in the Nation, but that it is among he very a few(prenominal) fine modern narrative poems in English. Early in 1935, Robinson fell ill with cancer.He stayed hospitalized until his death, correcting ships galley proofs of his last poem, King Jasper only hours before slipping into a final coma. Magazines and newspapers throughout the country took elaborate notice of Robinsons death, declared Gilbert, reminding their readers that he had been considered Americas foremost poet for nearly twenty years and praising his industry, integrity, and devotion to his art. It may come to the notice of our posterity (and then again it may not), wrote Robert Frost in his introduction to King Jasper, that this, our age, ran wild in the quest of new ways to be new. Robinson stayed content with the old-fashioned ways to be new. Robinson has gone to his place in Ame rican literature and go away his human place among us vacant, Frost concluded. We mourn, but with the qualification that, after all, his life was a enchant in the felicities of language.