(1869–1935). Although he received great critical acclaim during his lifetime, the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson was almost 50 years old before his work began to attract the attention of the public. He is remembered best for poems that re-create for the reader the lives and personalities of small-town New Englanders like those he knew in his youth.
Robinson was born on Dec. 22, 1869, in Head Tide, Me. He passed his boyhood in Gardiner, Me., the “Tilbury Town” of his poems. He entered Harvard University in 1891 but left after two years because of his father’s illness. He had published two volumes of verse by 1899, when he went to New York City. He continued to write while he supported himself by various kinds of work. Through President Theodore Roosevelt, who became interested in his poetry, he got a position in the New York Customs House and worked there for several years.
The rest of Robinson’s life was devoted to writing. For many years he summered at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H., where much of his finest poetry was written. He was awarded the gold medal of the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1929 and three times received a Pulitzer prize. He died in New York City on April 6, 1935.
Among Robinson’s best-known individual poems are Miniver Cheevy, Richard Cory, Mr. Flood’s Party, and The Sheaves. Volumes of poetry include The Children of the Night, published in 1897, The Town Down the River (1910), The Man Against the Sky (1916), Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), Collected Poems (1921), The Man Who Died Twice (1924), Dionysus in Doubt (1925), Tristram (1927), Sonnets (1928), The Glory of the Nightingales (1930), Nicodemus (1932), and Amaranth (1934).