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Edwin arlington robinson

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Edwin Arlington Robinson (December 22, 1869 – April 6, 1935) was an American poet. Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on three occasions and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

With his father gone, Edwin became the man of the household. He tried farming and developed a close relationship with his brother's wife Emma Robinson, who after her husband Herman's death, moved back to Gardiner with her children. She twice rejected marriage proposals from Edwin, after which he permanently left Gardiner. He moved to New York, where he lived as an impoverished poet while cultivating friendships with other writers, artists, and intellectuals. In 1896, he self-published his first book, The Torrent and the Night Before, paying 100 dollars for 500 copies.[citation needed] Robinson meant it as a surprise for his mother. Days before the copies arrived, his mother died of diphtheria.

His second volume, Children of The Night, had a somewhat wider circulation. Its readers included President Theodore Roosevelt's son Kermit, who had received a copy from his teacher, who happened to be a friend of Robinson. Kermit then recommended it to his father, who, impressed by the poems and aware of Robinson's straits, invited Robinson to join him for dinner at the White House (though Robinson declined due to his lacking "suitable clothes") and in 1905 offered the writer a sinecure at the New York Customs Office. According to Edmund Morris, author of Theodore Rex, a tacit condition of his employment was that, in exchange for his desk and two thousand dollars a year, he should work "with a view to helping American letters", rather than the receipts of the United States Treasury. Robinson remained in the job until Roosevelt left office. In 1913, Robinson lived on Lighthouse Hill, Staten Island.

Gradually his literary successes began to mount. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times in the 1920s, and he was described as "more artful than Hardy and more coy than Frost and a brilliant sonneteer". During the last twenty years of his life he became a regular summer resident at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where several women made him the object of their devoted attention. Robinson and artist Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones visited the MacDowell Colony at the same times over a cumulative total of ten years. They had a romantic relationship in which she was in love with him, devoted to him and understood him, and was relaxed in her approach with him. He called her Sparhawk and was courteous towards her. They had a relationship that D. H. Tracy described as "courtly, quiet, and intense". She described him as a charming, sensitive, and emotionally grounded man with high moral values.

Robinson never married. He died of cancer on April 6, 1935, in the New York Hospital (now New York Cornell Hospital) in New York City. When he died, Sparhawk-Jones attended his vigil and then painted several works in his memory.

His childhood home in Gardiner was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971. Robinson's grandnephew David S. Nivison later became a noted expert on Chinese philosophy and Chinese history.

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