Edwin Arlington Robinson

One of the roughly prolific major American poets of the twentieth century, Edwin Arlington Robinson is, ironically, best remembered for only a handful of short rimes, stated Robert gigabit in the Concise mental lexicon of American Literary Biography. Fellow writer Amy Lowell tell in the crude York Times Book Review, Edwin Arlington Robinson is poetry. I can think of no other living writer who has so consistently devote his life to his work.Robinson is considered anomalous among American poets of his period for his devotion to his art he publish to the highest degree nothing during his long career except poetry. The expense of Robinsons single-mindedness, gibibyte explained, was virtually perpetuallyything else in life for which people strive, simply it eventually won for him both fortune and fame, as well as a pixilated position in literary hi twaddle as Americas first significant poet of the twentieth century. Robinson go outmed destined for a career in business or the sciences. He was the third son of a crocked 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 indite 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 published some poems in local newspapers and magazines and, as he later explained in a biographical piece published in Colophon, imperturbable a pile of rejection slips that must give up been hotshot of the largest and most comprehensive in literary history. Finally he unyielding to publish his poems himself, and contracted with Riverside, a vanity press, to produce The Torrent and The darkness Before, named after the first and last poems in the collection.In the poems of The Torrent and The nighttime Before, Robinson experimen ted with elaborate poetic forms and explored themes that would characterize much of his workthemes of personal failure, chaste endeavor, materialism, and the inevitability of change, according to Gilbert. He in any case established a genius recognizably his own an adherence to traditional forms at a time when most poets were experimenting with the genre (All his life Robinson strenuously objected to free verse, Gilbert remarked, replying once when asked if he wrote it, No, I write badly enough as it is. ), and laconic, everyday speech. Robinson mailed 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, said Gilbert.Read alsoHow Powerful Do You Find Atticus Finchs Closing linguistic process?The response was generally favorable, although perhaps the most significant review came from chivy Thurston Peck, who commented unfavorably in the Bookman on Robinsons bleak outlook and instinct of humor. Peck found Robinsons t unmatchable too grim for his tastes, manifestation 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 be unwarrantedered infants are exhausting to spell God with the wrong blocks. Encouraged by the largely arrogant critical reaction, Robinson quickly produced a second manuscript, The Children of the Night, which was also published by a vanity press, a takeoff rocket providing the necessary funds.Unfortunately, reviewers largely handle it Gilbert suggests that they were position off by the vanity imprint. In 1902, both friends persuaded the publisher Houghton Mifflin to publish Captain Craig, another book of Robinsons verse, by promising to subsidize part of the publishing costs. Captain Craigwas neither a popula r nor a critical success, and for several long time Robinson neglected poetry, rudderless from job to job in New York City and the Northeast.He took to potable heavily, and for a time it seemed that he would, as Gilbert put it, drop into permanent dissolution, as both his brothers had d atomic number 53. His whimsical Miniver Cheevy, Gilbert continued, the poem rough the mal fill raw who yearned for the past glories of the chivalric age and who finally coughed, and called it hazard/and kept on drinking, is presumably a comic self-portrait. Robinsons bunch 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 House to republish the book, but also reviewed it himself for the Outlook (I am not sure I understand Luke Havergal, he said, but I am entirely sure that I like it), and obtained a sinecure for its beginning at the New York Customs Housea post Robinson he ld until 1909. The two thousand dollar annual stipend that went with the post provided Robinson with financial security. In 1910, he repaid his debt to Roosevelt in The townspeople down the River, a collection of poems dedicated to the former president.Perhaps the best k directlyn 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 social 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 Modern Poets of Britain and America, about what lies behind the social veil of character, and is dark hints about sexuality, loyalty, and mans terrible will to surpass 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 bye the long c octogenarian 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 whitethorn come and the rain 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 quiesce summer night,/Went home and put a bullet through his head, and Tilbury Town itself is personified in the lines In f ine, we thought that he was everything/ To make us proclivity that we were in his place. The humanness against the Skyaccording to Gilbert, Robinsons most important single volume, and probably 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 archeozoic 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 jubilate 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 abolish of the shield of pain, and in his later work, it gives place to a great, pitying te nderness. success through Failure, that is the motto on the other side of his banner of Courage. And Robert Frost, in his introduction to Robinsons King Jasper, declared, His theme was unhappiness itself, but his expertness was as happy 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 Collected 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 muniment poem Tristram, one in a series of poems based on Arthurian legends. Tristram proved to be Robinsons only true popula r successit was that oddity of twentieth-century literature, a best-selling book-length poemand it received 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 few fine modern narrative poems in English. Early in 1935, Robinson fell ill with cancer.He stayed hospitalized until his death, correcting 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 accordingly 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 sta yed content with the old-fashioned ways to be new. Robinson has gone to his place in American literature and left his human place among us vacant, Frost concluded. We mourn, but with the qualification that, after all, his life was a revel in the felicities of language.