Edwin Arlington Robinson was born December 22, 1869, in the village of Head Tide, Maine. When he was still a child, the Robinson family moved to the nearby town of Gardiner, which figures prominently in Robinson’s poetry as “Tilbury Town.” In 1891 he entered Harvard College. A little collection of verse was privately printed in 1896 and the following year marked the appearance of his first representative work, The Children of the Night (1897).

Somewhat later, he was struggling in various capacities to make a living in New York, five years passing before the publication of Captain Craig (1902). This fine piece of psychology, in the cryptic vein of Browning but in Robinson’s own idiom, was brought to the attention of Theodore Roosevelt (then President of the United States), who became interested in the work of the poet and, a few years later, offered him a place in the New York Custom House. Robinson held this position from 1905 to 1910, leaving it the same year which marked the appearance of his most characteristic volume, The Town down the River. Robinson’s three books, up to this time, showed his clean, firmly-drawn quality; but, in spite of their excellences, they seem little more than a succession of preludes for the dynamic volume that was to establish him in the first rank of American poets. The Man Against the Sky, Robinson’s fullest and most penetrating work, appeared in 1916. (See Preface.)

In all of these books there is manifest that searching for truth, the constant questioning, that takes the place of mere acceptance. As the work of a verbal portrait painter nothing, with the exception of some of Frost’s pictures, has been produced that is at once so keen and so kindly; in the half-cynical, half-mystical etchings like “Cliff Klingenhagen,” “Miniver Cheevy,” “Richard Cory”—lines where Robinson’s irony is inextricably mixed with tenderness—his art is at its height.

Technically, Robinson is as precise as he is dexterous; there is never a false image or a blurred line in any of his verses which, while adhering to the strictest models and executed according to traditional forms, are made fresh and surprising. It is interesting to observe how the smoothness of his rhymes, playing against the hard outlines of his verse, emphasizes the terse, epigrammatic vigor of poems like “The Gift of God,” “The Field of Glory” and “The Master,” one of the finest evocations of Lincoln which is, at the same time, a bitter commentary on the commercialism of the times and the “shopman’s test of age and worth.”

Robinson’s blank verse is scarcely less individual. It is, in spite of a certain unblinking seriousness, always modern, always packed with the instant. In “Ben Johnson Entertains a Man from Stratford” we have the clearest and most human portrait of Shakespeare ever attempted; the lines run as fluently as good conversation, as inevitable as a perfect melody. In his two reanimations of the Arthurian legends, Merlin (1917) and Launcelot (1920), Robinson, shaming the tea-table idyls of Tennyson, has colored the tale with somber reflections of the collapse of old orders, the darkness of an age in ashes.

Although he is often accused of holding a negative attitude toward life, Robinson’s philosophy is essentially positive; a dogged if never dogmatic desire for a deeper faith, a greater light. It is a philosophy expressed in Captain Craig:

A collection of the poet’s later verse, The Three Taverns (1920), reflects the same high standards of conciseness and craftsmanship. Robinson lives in Peterboro, New Hampshire, during the summer; his home in the winter is in Brooklyn, New York.