![]() After going his own way quietly for so many years, he became widely read and exerted a strong influence on other poets, notably Robert Frost. Suddenly, with the poetic revival that preceded World War I, Robinson began to play a major role as a poet. He sometimes may have encountered the ghost of Melville, who had spent the last lonely years of his life there, haunted by the feeling that he had failed as a writer. Just so another president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, found Robinson’s poetry impressive and helped him get a clerkship in the New York Customs House, where he worked until 1910. Franklin Pierce, a grateful President, had rewarded his friend and campaign biographer, Hawthorne, with a post in the Sales Customs House and then with a more lucrative post as consul in Liverpool. Hawthorne checked sacks of coal as they were loaded in Boston Harbor Robinson checked shale. In earning his living as a writer Robinson experienced the same difficulties as Hawthorne had fifty years before and was forced to the same humiliating expedients. But he prospered neither as a poet nor as a businessman and ended by working as a checker of loads of shale during the building of the New York subway. His first volume of poems had been published while he was at home in Maine in 1897 a second volume appeared. Miserable and lonely most of the time, he moved to New York in 1895. Robinson studied at Harvard from 1891 to 1893 and afterward returned to Maine to stay for three years. While fond of his family, Edwin felt himself an outsider among them, as he also felt alienated from the society of his town. ![]() The parents were primarily interested in their two older sons and tended to ignore Edwin, though they recognized his exceptional intelligence. His father was a prosperous merchant his mother had been a schoolteacher. Robinson spent his childhood in a small town in Maine, a town which furnished him a setting for many of his poems as well as models for his characters. Robinson’s poetry was transitional, evaluating the present by using traditional forms and by including elements of transcendentalism and puritanism. He lived at the time following the Civil War when America was rebuilding and changing rapidly and when the dominant values of the country seemed to be growing increasingly materialistic. Edwin Arlington Robinson was a poet of transition.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |