Other poems in the volume include “Flammonde,” “Cassandra,” and the Shakespearean study “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford.” With Merlin (1917) he began the Arthurian trilogy completed by Lancelot (1920) and Tristram (1927, Pulitzer Prize), in which he studied the characters as individuals who act according to their particular passions, independently of supernatural powers.
“The Man Against the Sky” is the title piece of a collection of poems (1916) setting forth the author's philosophy of life with striking symbolic power. After this date, Robinson was able to give his entire time to poetry, much of which he wrote during his annual summer residence at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. The Town Down the River (1910) contains “Miniver Cheevy” and other portraits.
The Children of the Night impressed Theodore Roosevelt, and, upon the publication of Captain Craig (1902), the President helped Robinson escape from work as inspector of subway construction to a clerkship in the New York Custom House (1905–10). Many of the other poems are psychological portraits, similar in form to those of Browning, including such character studies as those of the wealthy and wise Richard Cory, who committed suicide for lack of a positive reason for being Cliff Klingenhagen, with his mysterious ironic philosophy of life the spiteful miser Aaron Stark Luke Havergal, the bereaved lover and romantic old John Evereldown. One reviewer stated that “The world is not beautiful to him, but a prison house,” to which Robinson later replied: “The world is not a ‘prison-house,’ but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.” Some of the poems of this book were reprinted, with additions, in The Children of the Night (1897), containing the “Credo” in which the poet recognizes that there is “not a glimmer” for one who “welcomes when he fears, the black and awful chaos of the night” but states that he feels “the coming glory of the Light” through an intuition of a spiritual guidance that transcends the life of the senses. In these early poems, strongly influenced by his reading of Hardy, he presents the first of his spare, incisive portraits of the people of his Tilbury Town, marked by a dry New England manner that proved cryptic to his few readers.
#EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON TORRENT#
His first volume of poems, The Torrent and the Night Before (1896), was privately printed. Was reared in Gardiner, Me., the prototype of his Tilbury Town, and after studying at Harvard (1891–93) was employed in New York City.