#EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON TORRENT#

He won the Pulitzer Prize three times in the 1920s. Gradually his literary successes began to mount. Robinson remained in the job until Roosevelt left office. Impressed by the poems and aware of Robinson's straits, Roosevelt in 1905 secured the writer a job at the New York Customs Office. Its readers included President Theodore Roosevelt's son Kermit, who recommended it to his father. His second volume, The Children of the Night, had a somewhat wider circulation.

Days before the copies arrived, Mary Palmer Robinson died of diphtheria. Robinson meant it as a surprise for his mother.

#EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON TORRENT#

In 1896 he self-published his first book, The Torrent and the Night Before, paying 100 dollars for 500 copies. He moved to New York, where he led a precarious existence as an impoverished poet while cultivating friendships with other writers, artists, and would-be intellectuals. She twice rejected marriage proposals from Edwin, after which he permanently left Gardiner. He tried farming and developed a close relationship with his brother's wife Emma Robinson, who after her husband Herman's death moved back to Gardiner with her children.

With his father gone, Edwin became the man of the household. Now for the first time I seem to have something like a favorable opportunity and this winter I shall make a beginning. Writing has been my dream ever since I was old enough to lay a plan for an air castle. Robinson had returned to Gardiner by mid-1893. 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. Sometimes I try to imagine the state my mind would be in had I never come here, but I cannot. The thought seems a little queer, but it cannot be otherwise. I suppose this is the last letter I shall ever write you from Harvard.

He wrote his friend Harry Smith on June 21, 1893: Though short, his stay in Cambridge included some of his most cherished experiences, and there he made his most lasting friendships. Edwin returned to Harvard for a second year, but it was to be his last one as a student there. Robinson's literary career had false-started.Įdwin's father, Edward, died after Edwin's first year at Harvard. He was even invited to meet with the editors, but when he returned he complained to his friend Mowry Saben, 'I sat there among them, unable to say a word'. Within the first fortnight of being there, The Harvard Advocate published Robinson's 'Ballade of a Ship'. His real desire was to get published in one of the Harvard literary journals. His mission was not to get all A's, as he wrote his friend Harry Smith, 'B, and in that vicinity, is a very comfortable and safe place to hang'. He took classes in English, French, and Shakespeare, as well as one on Anglo-Saxon that he later dropped. In late 1891, at the age of 21, Edwin entered Harvard University as a special student. Robinson's poem 'Richard Cory' is thought to refer to this brother. His other brother, Herman, a handsome and charismatic man, married the woman Edwin himself loved, but Herman suffered business failures, became an alcoholic, and ended up estranged from his wife and children, dying impoverished in a charity hospital in 1901. His brother Dean died of a drug overdose.

Robinson's early difficulties led many of his poems to have a dark pessimism and his stories to deal with 'an American dream gone awry'. He described his childhood in Maine as 'stark and unhappy': his parents, having wanted a girl, did not name him until he was six months old, when they visited a holiday resort other vacationers decided that he should have a name, and selected a man from Arlington, Massachusetts to draw a name out of a hat. Robinson was born in Head Tide, Lincoln County, Maine, but his family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1870. Edwin Arlington Robinson was an American poet who won three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.

Edwin arlington robinson