Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Edwin Arlington Robinson, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 3019 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Customer Reviews (5)

Great poet
An under-rated, poet, whom I'd never been told about in any American lit class.Worth reading again and again.

Fine selection
Robinson was a creator of trenchant mini-biographies in verse, many of which became instant classics and familiar to every schoolchild, such as "Miniver Cheevy" and "Richard Cory"--which was even referred to in a Simon and Garkunkel song in their landmark Bookends album. Sadly, such education seems to have vanished from our schools and the experience of generation X'ers in favor of MTV and video games, and their mental development is the poorer for it. But Robinson's gifts for insightful and penetrating observations of people's character, and his unique poetic style, which avoided classical norms as well as free verse, was unique and has remained unequalled. Truly a great American of letters who should be better known today. Despite our greater scientific and technological achievements, we live in a more ignorant, barbaric, and less literate age than Robinson did.

This is a correction offered to Amazon.com
As a Robinson scholar, I strongly recommend reading his poetry.This volume contains only a small fraction of the poet's work, but the selections are good.

However, I am writing not as a review, but as a message of correction to Amazon.com:You give the author's name as EDWARD Arlington Robinson.The poet's name is EDWIN Arlington Robinson.(A common error, but for Amazon? tsk tsk.)

Winifred Sullivan

The poet of hard reality
I first read the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson in school. They were quite surprising then and somewhat menacing. For they told of things happening to people which were not supposed to happen to them. They told of great unhappiness, often disguised. "Miniver Cheevy child of scorn, cursed the day that he was born" And Miniver of course lived for the great past which never was. Another of these characters the imperially correct Richard Cory " went home one day and put a bullet in his head."
Robinson is I believe considered best as a poet when he writes these character- stories, and portraits of failure. And this when he had a whole other world of poetic works, including 'romantic poems' on Arthurian times.
He was a rarity in that he considered himself a poet by vocation and dedicated himself wholly to this, despite years of poverty and frustration. He had come from a wealthy family which had in losing its fortune known many personal disasters.
He was in late- career adopted by President Roosevelt who secured him a nice Melville-like customs job where he could better devote himself to writing. He chose 'Poetry' as his life even desisting from family life on the grounds that it might hurt his poetry.
The poetic character sketches which tell life- stories in a few stanzas are still today powerful reading.
In an analysis of his verse David Perkins writes,"If a formula could be given for a typical poem of Robinson, it would include the following elements: characterization; indirect and allusive narration; contemporary setting and recognition of the impingement of setting on individual lives; psychological realism and interest in exploring the tangles of human feelings and relationships; an onlooker or observer as speaker, making the poems impersonal and objective with respect to Robinson himself; a penchant for the humorous point of view combined with an awareness that life is more essentially tragic; a language that is colloquial, sinewy, and subtle as it conveys twists of implication in continually active thinking; a mindfulness of the difficulty of moral judgment but also a concern for it."

"There was more than sound. . . more than just an axe."
Like fellow New England poet Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson helped limber up traditional, rhymed American verse, steering it away from the stilted and bombastic norms of the 19th century while also avoiding free verse.More importantly, Robinson wrote about "the other half" -- drunks, dreamers, women-chasers, narcissistic suicides, jettisoned lover-boys, devastated widows, brutal misers. By doing so, he paved the way for the modernist obsesssion with the "common man".(In fact, he is still best known for his biting characterizations of Luke Havergal, Richard Cory, and Cliff Klingenhagen).A tense but satirical electricity runs through all of his work.As Frost said, "Robinson's theme was unhappiness itself, but his skill was as happy as it was playful...His life was a revel in the felicities of language."

The earlier poetry is predominately concerned with failure and misery, "the withered souls of men", as Robinson put it.(Robinson wrote much this poetry while working as a ticket collector on the New York subway, not long out of Harvard).Men have paid a price for their innocence and are unable, like Zola (whom he praises in a poem) to look squarely at the "compromising chart of hell" they have created.Great democratic mobs judge each others' grief, a grief they can seldom comprehend.Writers worship "the flicker and not the flame".Misery and the passing of things toll like a villanelle in most of Robinson's early work:"There is ruin and decay," "long centuries have come and gone," the world seems to be churning toward the "western gate" of darkness, death's portal.

By contrast, the more mature Robinson is more interested in light and voices and spiritual illumination.He sees great value in our intellectual and spiritual struggles, our so-called "modern" ideas, even though they may be "some day be quaint as any [tale] told / In almagest or chronicle of old."The older Robinson does not fight against the ultimately unknowable realities.He is not a disjointed Romantic raging against the misnamed "encroachments" of time.He is glad that reality remains a mystery in the end, a great and indecipherable code of silent stars and sheaves of girl-like, golden wheat that speak love in their very silence.The world, like true poetry, has "a mighty meaning of a kind / That tells the more the more it is not told."

I bought this book several years ago in Malta during a bout of homesickness and it has been blowing my mind ever since.Check it out! ... Read more

Book Description
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was the first of the great American modernist poets.

"No poet ever understood loneliness and separateness better than Robinson," James Dickey has observed.Robinson's lyric poems illuminate the hearts and minds of the most unlikely subjects—the downtrodden, the bereft, and the misunderstood.Even while writing in meter and rhyme, he used everyday language with unprecedented power, wit, and sensitivity.With his keen understanding of ordinary people and a gift for harnessing the rhythms of conversational speech, Robinson created the vivid character portraits for which he is best known, among them "Aunt Imogen," "Isaac and Archibald," "Miniver Cheevy," and "Richard Cory."Most of his poems are setin the fictive Tilbury Town—based on his boyhood home of Gardiner, Maine—but his work reaches far beyond its particular locality in its focus on struggle and redemption in human experience. ... Read more

Book Description

At the time of his death in 1935, Edwin Arlington Robinson was regarded as the leading American poet-the equal of Frost and Stevens. In this biography, Scott Donaldson tells the intriguing story of this poet's life, based in large part on a previously unavailable trove of more than 3,000 personal letters, and recounts his profoundly important role in the development of modern American literature.

Born in 1869, the youngest son of a well-to-do family in Gardiner, Maine, Robinson had two brothers: Dean, a doctor who became a drug addict, and Herman, an alcoholic who squandered the family fortune. Robinson never married, but he fell in love as many as three times, most lastingly with the woman who would become his brother Herman's wife. Despite his shyness, Robinson made many close friends, and he repeatedly went out of his way to give them his support and encouragement.

Still, it was always poetry that drove him. He regarded writing poems as nothing less than his calling-what he had been put on earth to do. Struggling through long years of poverty and neglect, he achieved a voice and a subject matter all his own. He was the first to write about ordinary people and events-an honest butcher consumed by grief, a miser with "eyes like little dollars in the dark," ancient clerks in a dry goods store measuring out their days like bolts of cloth. In simple yet powerful rhetoric, he explored the interior worlds of the people around him.

Robinson was a major poet and a pivotal figure in the course of modern American literature, yet over the years his reputation has declined. With his biography, Donaldson returns this remarkable talent to the pantheon of great American poets and sheds new light on his enduring legacy.

Customer Reviews (3)

Review of Daonaldson, Scott: Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life
Review of Donaldson, Scott, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life



This book is important partly because it is the first biography in 40 years of the early twentieth-century's most renowned American poet.Thoroughly researched by an experienced biographer, Prof. Scott Donaldson (e.g., Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever), it provides a comprehensive account of EAR's life, as well as brief discussions of many of his best poems, composed between the 1890s and his death in 1935.Donaldson has the advantage of Robinson letters not available to earlier writers; other resources include critical works into this century and his own literary background.The book may provoke further discussion on the topic of love and may present more personal detail than many readers want or need, yet it also allows for a deeper sense of both the man and the poet. It can fill gaps and/or be a refresher for scholars and teachers.Students might peruse the volume for understanding and perhaps the inspiration to read Robinson further.The extensive bibliography is valuable.I recommend this biography and suggest it as a catalyst (along with Donald Hall's and other recent critical works) for restoring E. A. Robinson to his place as one of America's greatest men of letters.

Winifred H. Sullivan, Ph.D.



195 words

Finally overlooked Robinson come to life
Who'd guess a biography of a shy poet from Maine would be such a page-turner? But the story of Robinson kept me riveted. A mother who didn't bother to name him right away since she wanted a girl, a father who considered him a loser, one brother addicted to morphine, another (the father's favorite) who's a raging alcoholic and incidentally stole the first girl Robinson loved. As a poet, he initially suffered financially and commercially for his beliefs as he was the first to write about common people, the gritty and the ordinary, something I never knew. His best-known poem, "Richard Cory," is no longer my only favorite since I've read Dear Friends, House on the Hill and Sheaves. The book's author, Scott Donaldson, apparently had the fortune of using previously unavailable sources, and he really makes Robinson come to life as person and a poet.

First Crack
I've been reading three big jumbo biographies of literary figures all at the same time, this one and the new lives of William Empson and Kingsley Amis (the Amis one comes out in April), and this book, A POET'S LIFE, is the one I figured ahead of time I'd like the least. I went into it scoffing, but came out, if not a convert to Arlington Robinson, a convert to Scott Donaldson, who took a chance with this enigmatic figure and at least squeezed the scrotum of the sphinx hard enough to make him give up a few of his secrets.

Robinson's youth was joyful, his family close, but a series of interrelated family tragedies scarred his adolescence and delivered him into manhood an emotional wreck on many levels. Donaldson provides a table of these tragedies, that's the only possible way to keep them straight, but it's the cumulative effect that matters: when Mary died, the mother of the three boys, her diphtheria kept away every townsperson. "No one would come near Mary Robinson's body or set foot inside the house where she had died." The boys had to prepare her for burial themselves. Even the preacher kept a handkerchief over his face, and avoided facing the grave as he spoke. "It was snowing. There were no other mourners in attendance. During the funeral, one kind neighbor took the risk of hanging a bag of doughnuts on the front doorknob of the Robinson house." Shortly afterwards, Edwin lost his two beloved brothers to addictions, and he himself became a poet--as Donaldson theorizes, an addiction like any other. Gardiner, Maine, was on the verge of a drastic reduction in status, as a city, as a trading center, as a place on the map. Its mills and factories shortly to close. Robinson looked back a thousand times in his poetry, but in life he only rarely returned to the place of his shame, even though his closest relations still clung to their bourgeois gentility.

For himself, the life of a poet entailed living in Boston and New York, and the artists' colony of McDowell, where he became the elder statesman. On his emotional life Donaldson is especially interesting. Robinson never married, and it is sometimes thought that he cherished a lifelong crush on the girl his doctor brother, Herman, married: Emma. I'm not so convinced, but Donaldson makes a good story out of it, pointing out that Robinson's numerous booklength poems frequently tell the same story, a woman who should have married a sensitive man, winding up with his prosperous counterpart, sometimes a brother.

Success came late. He compared his poetry to "rat poison to editors." For eleven years in a row no US magazine paid a penny for any of his contributions. He came of age in the same era as a few other now forgotten poets, (William Vaughan Moody and Ridgely Torrance for example); of them all today only Robert Frost is as read as Robinson. (Indeed many place him in a much higher rank.) In A POET'S LIFE, Frost comes across as a selfish, conniving d--k, but that's no surprise, is it? However, Robinson's aborted Harvard career did eventually plow the way for his surprise success--never count out a Harvard man--and Theodore Roosevelt, of all people, made him a star of the first magnitude (for EAR was the tutor of Teddy's son, Kermit, at Harvard, and Kermit felt sorry for him.) TR's review of Robinson's second volume, THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT, remains, Donaldson notes, the only piece of literary criticism ever published by a sitting US president. Can you imagine our president today turning his hand to such a task? Roosevelt found him a sinecured job with the US government, even though he had sworn to forego this corrupt practice, which had been the pleasure of every previous US head of state, finding jobs for one's cronies. Robinson was Roosevelt's poet guy, a badge of class, even of modernism.

Robinson seems never to have gone out on a date with any woman, much less lost his virginity, and his friendships with other men were of such intensity that some have suspected, well, maybe he was having sex with them (or drawn that way at any rate). Any bit of evidence in this direction is immediately retracted by Donaldson. Mowry Saben, upon whose memoir Donaldson relies for a lot of this "evidence," isn't on second thought such a reliable witness, for he might have been bisexual himself. (We hear this a couple of times.) This gets my goat, for why does being bisexual mean that you're automatically untrustworthy? Perhaps the gay or bisexual would be more eager to ascribe their own condition to any prominent friend. I think it's the other way around, and Donaldson plays up the EAR-Emma "love affair" on evidence no less vague than Saben's, never adding the disclaimer, "However, Witness X was a known heterosexual and may be prejudiced in that direction." All I can say is, that Robinson seems to have left little old Maine for good reason, and he invariably turned up in homosexual hotbeds of the period, Manhattan's Greenwich Village and Chelsea, the back hills of Boston, and the McDowell Colony, where the boys are, EAR was there. And yet we get this sort of thing, again and again: "Only Mowry Saben among those who knew Robinson well, was moved to speculate that he had repressed homoerotic tendencies. And Saben, as we shall see, was an enthusiastic supporter of live and license in all their forms." (Page 261.) WTF, Scott Donaldson?

He was a tenant of Jimmie Moore's in NYC, the sybaritic gamesman who made his apartment building a Xanadu of fun and pleasure (even installing a bowling alley in the basement). Moore was the black sheep grandson of the divine Clement Clarke Moore, the one who gave us "Twas the Night Before Christmas." I think, if you've got the stamina to read this massive book, that you'll fall in love with the poet you meet in these generous and wise pages. And much of his poetry, which Donaldson quotes very aptly, rewards new attention, even a hundred years later. You get to know now only EAR, but the bohemians and Mandarins of a whole vanished culture--hundreds of them, from Amy Lowell and Algernon Blackwood to such "outsider artists" as Franklin Schenck," the painter--a student of Eakins--whom Robinson called the "modern St. Francis," who lived on an island outside East Northport, Long Island, on a "handkerchief of land." The "doctors told him he needed iron," writes Donaldson, "so he was boiling out an old horseshoe in a pot on his one-burner stove. He lacked the money to buy canvas, so he had painted birds and flowers and running streams on every window shade in his shack."
... Read more

Product Description
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) was hailed by many in his day as America’s foremost poet, outranking T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound. Perhaps best known for his sonnets, he startlesreaders into attention and response through deliberate obscurity and ambiguity and demanding syntax. Many of Robinson’s works continue to be published today, introducing him to new generations of readers. This comprehensive encyclopedia provides information on Robinson’s poems—he published more than 200—and also his less well-known prose works, along with entries on his family, friends, and professional associates. For entries on his writings, the year published, summaries of the works, background information, and critical commentary illuminating enigmatic passages are provided. For people, the entries provide biographical information and describe the influence the person had on Robinson’s life. ... Read more

Book Description
A tribute to one of America's foremost poets. The book is a comprehensive appraisal of all Robinson's work since his first slim volume of verse. The discussion of Robinson's ideas, men, plays, legends, and history is plentifully illustrated with selections from his verse.

THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED BY:Catalogue of the Lamont Library, Harvard College. ... Read more

Book Description
A comprehensive E. A. Robinson bibliography to the year 1936.

THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED BY:Books for College Libraries. ... Read more