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.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was the first of the great American modernist poets."No poet ever understood loneliness and separateness better than Robinson," James Dickey has observed. Robinson's lyric poems illuminate the hearts and minds of the most unlikely subjects—the downtrodden, the bereft, and the misunderstood. Even while writing in meter and rhyme, he used everyday language with unprecedented power, wit, and sensitivity. With his keen understanding of ordinary people and a gift for harnessing the rhythms of conversational speech, Robinson created the vivid character portraits for which he is best known, among them "Aunt Imogen," "Isaac and Archibald," "Miniver Cheevy," and "Richard Cory." Most of his poems are set in the fictive Tilbury Town—based on his boyhood home of Gardiner, Maine—but his work reaches far beyond its particular locality in its focus on struggle and redemption in human experience.

Edwin Arlington Robinson: Child of Scorn examines from a psychological standpoint Robinson's works and their relation to his own life. Robinson was a famous American poet, the winner of three Pulitzer prizes for poetry. In addition to his major works, he is particularly well-known for his short poems, including Richard Cory and Miniver Cheevy, which many people memorized in school. Robinson was born in 1869 and died in 1935. His life was a troubled one. His emotional problems and conflicts as reflected in his work are carefully analyzed in this book.

This volume contains 189 hitherto unpublished letters by Edwin Arlington Robinson. They were written between 1897 and 1930 to one of his first admirers, Edith Brower of Pennsylvania. The letters begin when the twenty-seven-year-old poet writes gratefully to the stranger who has expressed appreciation of his first, privately printed, book of poems, The Torrent and the Night Before. Soon he was carrying on an intense correspondence, baring his soul--safely, he believed, because the woman he described as "infernally bright and not at all ugly," with "something of a literary reputation," was "too old to give me a chance to bother myself with any sentimental uneasiness." (She was twenty-one years his senior.) Continually reflecting his laconic, self-deprecating Yankee spirit, the letters range from the uncontrollable outpourings of a lonely individual, desperate for encouragement and understanding, to brief words of greeting or farewell. Without reserve, Robinson--who was eventually awarded the Pulitzer prize for poetry three times--confides his reactions to people and places, his thoughts about his own work, and his personal opinions of such writers as Browning, Dickens, Hardy, Moody, and Pater. Mr. Cary has included Miss Brower's unpublished memoir on the poet's character and literary career, "Memories of Edwin Arlington Robinson," and her penetrating review of The Children of the Night. In addition to an informative Introduction, he contributes full explanatory notes, a list of Robinson's works, and an index.

`Traditional yet original, realistic but not in the reductive sense, he is too good to be forgotten.' ROBERTSON DAVIES Robinson's Arthurian poems, published between 1917 and 1927, won him a Pulitzer prize and yet are almost unknown today. With his introspective New England style and quiet tone, he brilliantly catches the tension between reason and passion that drives the characters of the Arthurian stories: these are modern lovers, with the philosophical and psychological concerns of the early 20th century. The sense of vision, and the feeling that the world of Arthur mirrors the fate of all mankind, binds the diverse characters together, and makes Robinson's poems essential reading for everyone interested in the Arthurian legend in the twentieth century.