Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson

About Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson (December 22, 1869 – April 6, 1935) was a major American poet of the early 20th century, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry three times, in 1922, 1925 and 1928. He began to write on a regular basis at the age of eleven, and attended meetings of the local poetry association, of which he was the youngest member.
Edwin studied at Harvard from 1891 to 1893, despite his father's reservations about the usefulness of pursuing a higher education. Robinson published his first collection of poems The Torrent and the Night Before in 1896, and The Children of the Night, in 1897 (The publishing costs of the two works were financed by friends). Not earning his living as a poet, he obtained a job as an inspector for the New York subway. In 1902, he had Captain Craig and Other Poems published. This publication goes unnoticed until President Theodore Roosevelt devotes a laudatory article to it. Roosevelt also provided him with a more interesting job, which left him time for writing poetry, which he occupied from 1905 to 1910.
His first major success was The Man Against the Sky in 1916. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems (1921) in 1922. He received this award again in 1925 thanks to The Man Who Died Twice, published in 1924. It enjoys an increasingly favorable critical reception. In 1928, a trilogy devoted to Arthurian legends, with a collection on Merlin in 1917, Lancelot in 1920, and Tristan in 1927, earned him, for the third time, this Pulitzer Prize.
He never married and lived a good part of his life in solitude. He died in New York on April 6, 1935.

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