Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet for Poets and Poetry Readers

By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Snowy creek Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson was the first great American Modernist poet

My favorite period of American literary history is roughly 1895 to 1940. As literary periods go, it’s a large swath of time, and it includes both the Realists and Modernists> (Perhaps it’s because I don’t see a clear delineation between those two schools of literature.)

For novelists, that includes Stephen Crane, Jack London, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. My wife thinks I’m slightly crazy, but I’m one of the few people she’s ever heard of who enjoys reading Faulkner.

For poets, it’s T.S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Frost, and others — including Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935).

If I ask myself why this period is my favorite, I might answer by saying I really like the writers. I could also say it is these poets and novelists who most influenced the outstanding English teachers I had in middle school, high school, and college (not a bad or even mediocre apple in the lot). It’s not that I dislike later writers or contemporaries, or that I think literature has gone to rack and ruin. It is, I think, more about the writers I keep coming back to when I need to “center” or “re-center” my reading and even my mental and emotional states.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson

In short, I find these writers calming, even in their often stark and unsympathetic depictions of life and people. Consider Robinson.

He was, and wasn’t, the proverbial overnight success. A Maine-born poet struggling to make it in New York City, he scraped together enough money in 1896 to self-publish 500 copies of his first collection, The Torrent and the Night Before. He hoped to give a copy to his ailing mother, but she died a few days before the published copies arrived. His second volume, The Children of the Night, was traditionally published in 1897. It caught the attention of Kermit Roosevelt, son of the then vice-president, who told his father about it. Teddy liked it so much that he eventually offered Robinson a job in the New York Customs Office, one that allowed Robinson to write almost full-time.

The poet’s reputation grew steadily. By 1920, he was one of the most read poets in America. In the 1920s, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry three times, including the first ever awarded for a poetry book in 1922. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. He wrote two plays. Between his last Pulitzer Prize in 1929 and his death from cancer in 1935, he published seven more poetry collections.

Two of his poems were commonly taught and included in anthologies during my school years. “Miniver Cheevy” was published in 1910 as part of his collection The Town Down the River. But it was a poem he published in that 1897 volume, The Children of the Night, that is likely his most famous.

Richard Cory

Children of the Night

The cover of the first edition

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked,
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Robinson was known for getting inside the heads and the lives of the people he wrote about. “Richard Cory” reads almost like an epitaph; you might expect to find it in Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 book  Spoon River Anthology. “Miniver Cheevy” has a similar feel; you might think Masters evokes Robinson in his famous anthology, and you wouldn’t be wrong.

Robinson Poetical Works and PlaysPlace is important in Robinson’s poetry. Faulkner had his Jefferson, Anderson his Winesburg, and Masters his Spoon River. Robinson had Tillbury Town, a New England-esque town with its officials, shopkeepers, eccentrics, and other residents. The Tillbury Town poems range across a number of his collections.

His poems often have haunting lines, seemingly pulled from real-life experiences. In “Old Trails,” a poem in The Man Against the Sky (1916), the poet by chance meets an old friend in Washing Square in New York City. The friend has not been a successful writer. “Behold a ruin who meant well,” he says. “My dreams have all come true to other men.” It is a poem about fame and success, how elusive it is, and what can happen when one gives up a dream.

Many of the volumes of Robinson’s poems are post-copyright and easily (and rather cheaply) accessible. Many are available in both e-book and print versions. There’s also a well-regarded biography of Robinson published in 2007 by Scott Donaldson (for some strange reason, it’s considerably cheaper in the print version). I read a Kindle version of both The Children of the Night (free), and the Delphi Project edition of his works and plays (at $1.99, a bargain).

Robinson was a poet who believed he was put on earth to do one primary thing, and that was to write poetry. And he wrote some astoundingly beautiful poems, ranging from his fictitious town to Arthurian legends about Merlin and Lancelot. He had a major and lasting influence on poetry, and he is still well worth reading today.

Photo by alvaroreguly, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

How to Read a Poem by Tania Runyan

5 star

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Glynn Young
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of the Civil War romance Brookhaven, as well as Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
Latest posts by Glynn Young (see all)
  • Poets and Poems: L.L. Barkat and “Beyond the Glass” - May 22, 2025
  • A History of Children’s Stories: “The Haunted Wood” by Sam Leith - May 20, 2025
  • World War II Had Its Poets, Too - May 15, 2025

Filed Under: article, book reviews, Books, Poems, poetry, poetry reviews, Poets

Try Every Day Poems...

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our May Menu

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

The Graphic Novel

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

How to Write Poetry

Your Comments

  • Poets and Poems: L.L. Barkat and “Beyond the Glass” - Tweetspeak Poetry on Love, Etc.: Poems of Love, Laughter, Longing & Loss
  • Glynn on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Sandra Fox Murphy on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Glynn on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2025 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy