Edwin Arlington Robinson : a poet's life
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Bibliographic Information
Edwin Arlington Robinson : a poet's life
Columbia University Press, c2007
- : cloth
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [517]-535) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
At the time of his death in 1935, Edwin Arlington Robinson was regarded as the leading American poet-the equal of Frost and Stevens. In this biography, Scott Donaldson tells the intriguing story of this poet's life, based in large part on a previously unavailable trove of more than 3,000 personal letters, and recounts his profoundly important role in the development of modern American literature. Born in 1869, the youngest son of a well-to-do family in Gardiner, Maine, Robinson had two brothers: Dean, a doctor who became a drug addict, and Herman, an alcoholic who squandered the family fortune. Robinson never married, but he fell in love as many as three times, most lastingly with the woman who would become his brother Herman's wife. Despite his shyness, Robinson made many close friends, and he repeatedly went out of his way to give them his support and encouragement. Still, it was always poetry that drove him. He regarded writing poems as nothing less than his calling-what he had been put on earth to do. Struggling through long years of poverty and neglect, he achieved a voice and a subject matter all his own.
He was the first to write about ordinary people and events-an honest butcher consumed by grief, a miser with "eyes like little dollars in the dark," ancient clerks in a dry goods store measuring out their days like bolts of cloth. In simple yet powerful rhetoric, he explored the interior worlds of the people around him. Robinson was a major poet and a pivotal figure in the course of modern American literature, yet over the years his reputation has declined. With his biography, Donaldson returns this remarkable talent to the pantheon of great American poets and sheds new light on his enduring legacy.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1. A Hell of a Name for a Poet 2. A Manor Town in Maine 3. Never So Young Again 4. Fall of the House of Robinson 5. A "Special" at Harvard 6. Farewell to Carefree Days 7. Shaping a Life 8. Loves Lost 9. Breaking Away 10. Poetry as a Calling 11. City of Artists 12. The Saga of Captain Craig 13. Down and Out 14. Theater Days 15. The End of Something 16. Down and Out, Yet Again 17. Life in the Woods, Death in Boston 18. Reversal of Fortune 19. A Poet Once Again 20. A Breakthrough Book 21. Reaching Fifty 22. Seasons of Success 23. A Sojourn in England 24. MacDowell's First Citizen 25. Recognition and Its Consequences 26. Generosities 27. Death of a Poet 28. Beyond the Sunset Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
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