Edwin Arlington Robinson

On December 22, 1869, Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in Head Tide, Maine (the same year as W. B. Yeats). His family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1870, which renamed “Tilbury Town,” became the backdrop for many of Robinson’s poems. Robinson described his childhood as stark and unhappy; he once wrote in a letter to Amy Lowell that he remembered wondering why he had been born at the age of six. After high school, Robinson spent two years studying at Harvard University as a special student and his first poems were published in the Harvard Advocate.

Robinson privately printed and released his first volume of poetry, The Torrent and the Night Before, in 1896 at his own expense; this collection was extensively revised and published in 1897 as The Children of the Night. Unable to make a living by writing, he got a job as an inspector for the New York City subway system. In 1902, he published Captain Craig and Other Poems. This work received little attention until President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a magazine article praising it and Robinson. Roosevelt also offered Robinson a sinecure in a U.S. Customs House, a job he held from 1905 to 1910. Robinson dedicated his next work, The Town Down the River (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), to Roosevelt.

Robinson’s first major success was The Man Against the Sky (The Macmillan Company, 1916). He also composed a trilogy based on Arthurian legends: Merlin (The Macmillan Company, 1917), Lancelot (T. Seltzer, 1920), and Tristram (The Macmillan Company, 1927), the latter of which won a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1928. Robinson was also awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems (The Macmillan Company, 1921) in 1922 and The Man Who Died Twice (Macmillan, 1924) in 1925. For the last twenty-five years of his life, Robinson spent his summers at the MacDowell Colony of artists and musicians in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Robinson never married and led a notoriously solitary lifestyle. He died in New York City on April 6, 1935.