Edwin Arlington Robinson
(1869-1935)
Contents
The Life and Poetry of Robinson
BRIEF INTRODUCTION: EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
The Poems
LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
The Plays
VAN ZORN
THE PORCUPINE
© Delphi Classics 2015
Version 1
Edwin Arlington Robinson
By Delphi Classics, 2015
NOTE
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The Life and Poetry of Robinson
Head Tide, Lincoln County, Maine — Robinson’s birthplace
BRIEF INTRODUCTION: EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
The Pulitzer Prize winning poet Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in Head Tide, Lincoln County, Maine, though his family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1871. In later years he was to describe his childhood in Maine as stark and unhappy, as his parents, who had wished for a girl, did not name him until he was six months old. When they visited a holiday resort, other holidaymakers decided that he should have a name and be given an identity beyond that of simply “the baby”. Therefore, these strangers put slips of paper with male first names written on them into a hat and chose someone to draw one out. The man who drew out the slip with “Edwin” written on it happened to live in Arlington, Massachusetts, which provided the easiest choice for a second name. Throughout his life, Robinson not only hated his given name, but also his family’s habit of calling him “Win”, and as an adult he always used the signature “E. A.”
Robinson’s early difficulties gave many of his poems a dark tone and pessimism, which critics have described as stories that deal with “an American dream gone awry.” In his youth, Robinson’s eldest brother, Dean, was a doctor and had become addicted to laudanum, while medicating himself for neuralgia. The middle brother, Herman, who was a handsome and particularly charismatic man, married Emma Löehen Shepherd, the woman Edwin had passionately fallen in love with.
Although Emma thought highly of Edwin and would often encourage him in his poetry, he was too young and immature for her to be in realistic competition with his brother. Nevertheless, this did not prevent him from being deeply hurt by Emma opting for what he considered shallowness over depth. The marriage was a great blow to Edwin’s pride and during the wedding ceremony in 1890, he remained at home, composing a poem of protest, “Cortège”, the title of which refers to the train that took the newly married couple out of town to their new life in St. Louis, Missouri. Herman would later suffer business failures, become an alcoholic and be estranged from his wife and children, dying impoverished in 1909 of tuberculosis at Boston City Hospital.
That same year, Edwin entered Harvard University as a special student, taking classes in English, French, and Shakespeare. He told a friend that he did not aim to achieve all A’s, as “B, and in that vicinity, is a very comfortable and safe place to hang.” However, his real desire was to be published in one of the Harvard literary journals. Within the first fortnight, Robinson’s Ballade of a Ship appeared in The Harvard Advocate. He was even invited to meet with the editors, but when he returned later that evening he complained to his friend Mowry Saben, “I sat there among them, unable to say a word.”
Although Edwin’s father died after the first year at Harvard, the young poet returned for a second year, but it was to be his last one as a student there. Though short, his stay in Cambridge included some of his most cherished experiences, where he made some of his most lasting friendships. He wrote to his friend Harry Smith, “I feel that I have got comparatively little from my two years, but still, more than I could get in Gardiner if I lived a century.” Robinson returned to Gardiner by June 1893 and had plans to start writing seriously. In October he wrote to his friend Gledhill: “Writing has been my dream ever since I was old enough to lay a plan for an air castle. Now for the first time I seem to have something like a favorable opportunity and this winter I shall make a beginning.”
With his father gone, Edwin was at the head of the household. He tried farming, developing a close relationship with his brother’s wife Emma, who after Herman’s death had moved back to Gardiner with her children. She twice rejected marriage proposals from Edwin, after which he permanently left Gardiner.
He then took the bold step of moving to New York to seek his fortune as a poet, leading a precarious life as an impoverished author, cultivating friendships with other writers, artists and would-be intellectuals. In 1896 he self-published his first collection of poems, The Torrent and the Night Before, paying $100 for 500 copies. He had intended it as a surprise for his mother, but several days before the copies arrived, Mary Palmer Robinson died of diphtheria.
Robinson’s second volume, Children of the Night, enjoyed a much wider circulation, gaining the recognition of President Theodore Roosevelt’s son Kermit, who recommended the book to his father. Impressed by the poems and aware of the poet’s financial straits, Roosevelt secured the writer a job at the New York Customs Office in 1905. Reportedly, a condition of his employment was that, in exchange for his desk and two thousand dollars a year, he should work with a view to helping American letters, rather than the receipts of the United States Treasury. Robinson remained working in that role until Roosevelt left office.
Increasingly, as his literary successes progressed, Robinson won great acclaim for his varied range of verses and celebrated sonnets, winning the Pulitzer Prize three times in the 1920s. During the last twenty years of his life he became a regular summer resident at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where several women made him the object of their devoted attention, though he maintained a solitary life and never married. Robinson died of cancer on April 6, 1935 in the New York Hospital, now New York Cornell Hospital, in New York City.
In his early works, among his greatest achievements in poetic forms was the dramatic lyric, as exemplified in the title poem of The Man Against the Sky. The poem exemplifies the power to affirm life’s meaning in spite of its intensely dark side. During these years Robinson perfected the poetic form for which he became so well known, employing a structure based on stanzas, rhyming patterns and a precise, natural diction, combined with a dramatic examination of the human condition. Among the best poems of this period are Richard Cory, Miniver Cheevy, Flammonde, and Eros Turannos. Robinson broke with the tradition of late Romanticism, introducing instead the preoccupations and unadorned style of naturalism into American poetry. In the second phase of his career, he composed longer narrative poems that blended the concern of his dramatic lyrics with psychological portraiture. In 1917 he published Merlin, the first of three long blank-verse narrative poems based on the King Arthur legends, to be followed by Lancelot (1920) and Tristram (1927).
Herman Robinson, brother of Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Emma Shepherd Robinson, sister in law of the poet
Robinson as a youth, 1888
Robinson as a young man
CONTENTS
The Man Against the Sky
Flammonde
The Gift of God
The Clinging Vine
Cassandra
John Gorham
Stafford’s Cabin
Hillcrest
Old King Cole
Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford
Eros Turannos
Old Trails
The Unforgiven
Theophilus
Veteran Sirens
Siege Perilous
Another Dark Lady
The Voice of Age
The Dark House
The Poor Relation
The Burning Book
Fragment
Lisette and Eileen
Llewellyn and the Tree
Bewick Finzer
Bokardo
The Man Against the Sky
The Children of the Night
John Evereldown
Luke Havergal
Three Quatrains
An Old Story
Ballade by the Fire
Ballade of Broken Flutes
Her Eyes
Two Men
Villanelle of Change
The House on the Hill
Richard Corey
Boston
Calvary
Dear Friends
The Story of the Ashes and the Flame
Amaryllis
Zola
The Pity of the Leaves
Aaron Stark
The Garden
Cliff Klingenhagen
Charles Carville’s Eyes
The Dead Village
Two Sonnets
The Clerks
Fleming Helphenstine
Thomas Hood
Horace to Leuconoë
Reuben Bright
The Altar
The Tavern
Sonnet
George Crabbe
Credo
On the Night of a Friend’s Wedding
Sonnet
Verlaine
Sonnet
Supremacy
The Chorus of Old Men in “Ægeus”
The Wilderness
Octaves
Two Quatrains
The Torrent
L’envoy
Captain Craig, Etc.
Captain Craig
Captain Craig: II
Captain Craig: III.
Isaac and Archibald
The Return of Morgan and Fingal
Aunt Imogen
The Klondike
The Growth of “Lorraine”
The Sage
Erasmus
The Woman and The Wife
The Book of Annandale
Sainte-Nitouche
As a World Would Have It
The Corridor
Cortège
Partnership
Twilight Song
Variations of Greek Themes
The Field of Glory
Merlin
Merlin I
Merlin II
Merlin III
Merlin IV
Merlin V
Merlin VI
Merlin VII
The Town Down the River
The Master
The Town Down the River
An Island
Calverly’s
Leffingwell
Clavering
Lingard and the Stars
Pasa Thalassa Thalassa
Momus
Uncle Ananias
The Whip
The White Lights
Exit
Leonora
The Wise Brothers
But for the Grace of God
For Arvia
The Sunken Crown
Doctor of Billiards
Shadrach O’Leary
How Annandale Went Out
Alma Mater
Miniver Cheevy
The Pilot
Vickery’s Mountain
Bon Voyage
The Companion
Atherton’s Gambit
For a Dead Lady
Two Gardens in Linndale
The Revealer
Lancelot
Lancelot I
Lancelot II
Lancelot III
Lancelot IV
Lancelot V
Lancelot VI
Lancelot VII
Lancelot VIII
Lancelot IX
The Three Taverns
The Valley of the Shadow
The Wandering Jew
Neighbors
The Mill
The Dark Hills
The Three Taverns
Demos
The Flying Dutchman
Tact
On the Way
John Brown
The False Gods
Archibald’s Example
London Bridge
Tasker Norcross
A Song at Shannon’s
Souvenir
Discovery
Firelight
The New Tenants
Inferential
The Rat
Rahel to Varnhagen
Nimmo
Peace on Earth
Late Summer
An Evangelist’s Wife
The Old King’s New Jester
Lazarus
Avon’s Harvest, etc.
Avon’s Harvest
Mr. Flood’s Party
Ben Trovato
The Tree in Pamela’s Garden
Vain Gratuities
Job the Rejected
Lost Anchors
Recalled
Modernities
Afterthoughts
Caput Mortuum
Monadnock Through the Trees
The Long Race
Many Are Called
Rembrandt to Rembrandt
Robinson, 1897
Edwin Arlington Robinson by Lilla Cabot Perry, 1916
The Man Against the Sky
TO THE MEMORY OF WILLIAM EDWARD BUTLER
Flammonde
THE MAN Flammonde, from God knows where,
With firm address and foreign air,
With news of nations in his talk
And something royal in his walk,
With glint of iron in his eyes, 5
But never doubt, nor yet surprise,
Appeared, and stayed, and held his head
As one by kings accredited.
Erect, with his alert repose
About him, and about his clothes, 10
He pictured all tradition hears
Of what we owe to fifty years.
His cleansing heritage of taste
Paraded neither want nor waste;
And what he needed for his fee 15
To live, he borrowed graciously.
He never told us what he was,
Or what mischance, or other cause,
Had banished him from better days
To play the Prince of Castaways. 20
Meanwhile he played surpassing well
A part, for most, unplayable;
In fine, one pauses, half afraid
To say for certain that he played.
For that, one may as well forego 25
Conviction as to yes or no;
Nor can I say just how intense
Would then have been the difference
To several, who, having striven
In vain to get what he was given, 30
Would see the stranger taken on
By friends not easy to be won.
Moreover, many a malcontent
He soothed and found munificent;
His courtesy beguiled and foiled 35
Suspicion that his years were soiled;
His mien distinguished any crowd,
His credit strengthened when he bowed;
And women, young and old, were fond
Of looking at the man Flammonde. 40
There was a woman in our town
On whom the fashion was to frown;
But while our talk renewed the tinge
Of a long-faded scarlet fringe,
The man Flammonde saw none of that, 45
And what he saw we wondered at —
That none of us, in her distress,
Could hide or find our littleness.
There was a boy that all agreed
Had shut within him the rare seed 50
Of learning. We could understand,
But none of us could lift a hand.
The man Flammonde appraised the youth,
And told a f
ew of us the truth;
And thereby, for a little gold, 55
A flowered future was unrolled.
There were two citizens who fought
For years and years, and over nought;
They made life awkward for their friends,
And shortened their own dividends. 60
The man Flammonde said what was wrong
Should be made right; nor was it long
Before they were again in line,
And had each other in to dine.
And these I mention are but four 65
Of many out of many more.
So much for them. But what of him —
So firm in every look and limb?
What small satanic sort of kink
Was in his brain? What broken link 70
Withheld him from the destinies
That came so near to being his?
What was he, when we came to sift
His meaning, and to note the drift
Of incommunicable ways 75
That make us ponder while we praise?
Why was it that his charm revealed
Somehow the surface of a shield?
What was it that we never caught?
What was he, and what was he not? 80
How much it was of him we met
We cannot ever know; nor yet
Shall all he gave us quite atone
For what was his, and his alone;
Nor need we now, since he knew best, 85
Nourish an ethical unrest:
Rarely at once will nature give
The power to be Flammonde and live.
We cannot know how much we learn
From those who never will return, 90
Until a flash of unforeseen
Remembrance falls on what has been.
We’ve each a darkening hill to climb;
And this is why, from time to time
In Tilbury Town, we look beyond 95
Horizons for the man Flammonde.
The Gift of God
Works of Edwin Arlington Robinson Page 1