The Oxford Companion to American Literature | Robinson, Edwin Arlington
Robinson, Edwin Arlington( 1869–1935), was reared in Gardiner, Me., the prototype of his Tilbury Town, and after studying at Harvard (1891–93) was employed in New York City. His first volume of poems, The Torrent and the Night Before (1896), was privately printed. 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. 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...
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