Three Books of Poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Children of the Night
The Three Taverns
and The Man against the Sky
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869 - 1935)
Edwin Arlington Robinson (December 22, 1869 - April 6, 1935) was an American poet who won three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
Career
With his father gone, Edwin became the man of the household. 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. She twice rejected marriage proposals from Edwin, after which he permanently left Gardiner. 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. In 1896 he self-published his first book, The Torrent and the Night Before, paying 100 dollars for 500 copies. Robinson meant it as a surprise for his mother. Days before the copies arrived, Mary Palmer Robinson died of diphtheria.
His second volume, Children of the Night, had a somewhat wider circulation. Its readers included President Theodore Roosevelt's son Kermit, who recommended it to his father. Impressed by the poems and aware of Robinson's straits, Roosevelt in 1905 secured the writer a job at the New York Customs Office. According to Edmund Morris, author of Theodore Rex, a tacit 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 in the job until Roosevelt left office.
Gradually his literary successes began to mount. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times in the 1920s. and posterity has him described as ' more artful than Hardy and more coy than Frost and a brilliant sonneteer . 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. Robinson and artist Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones visited the MacDowell Colony at the same times over a cumulative total of ten years. They had a romantic relationship in which she was in love with him, devoted to him and understood him, and was relaxed in her approach with him. He called her Sparhawk and was courteous towards her. They had a relationship that D. H. Tracy described as "courtly, quiet, and intense." She described him as a charming, sensitive, and emotionally grounded man with high moral values.
Robinson never married. He died of cancer on April 6, 1935 in the New York Hospital (now New York Cornell Hospital) in New York City. When he died, Sparhawk-Jones attended his vigil and then painted several paintings in his memory.
His childhood home in Gardiner was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971. Robinson's grandnephew David S. Nivison later became a noted expert on Chinese philosophy and Chinese history.