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About
A Maine poet whose numerous volumes of verse explore the repressive life of small-town America, Edwin Arlington Robinson drew inspiration for his portraits and tales from the tortured lives of his family and acquaintances. Transforming autobiography into myth, he set these stories in the fictitious Tilbury Town, the poet’s emblem of the American dream gone awry, a place where creative genius is destroyed by neglect and misunderstanding.
Reared in Gardiner, Maine, and educated at Harvard, Robinson’s philosophical perspective came to combine the idealism of the waning Romantic Age with the dark pessimism of the dawning century. While he believed ardently in the divine spark within all man and nature, he inevitably found that spark clouded with what he called “the black and awful chaos of the night.” Given the bleak history of Robinson’s own life–poetic neglect, unrequited passion, and family problems with alcohol–his view is not surprising; what is more amazing is the stoicism with which he persevered, ultimately winning national recognition for his long Arthurian poem, Tristram, in 1928.
Robinson claimed to have experienced his poetic vocation as an epiphany when, at age seventeen, he became “violently excited over the structure of English blank verse.” An admirer of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, he set about to cloak his own poetic persona in a series of masks, creating a gallery of characters who were at once thinly veiled incarnations of his relatives and townsfolk and subtle manifestations of his own psyche.
–Thomas Hampson and Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold, PBS I Hear America Singing
Related Information
Songs
A Happy Man
Frank Lewin
Edwin Arlington Robinson
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A Mighty Runner
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Edwin Arlington Robinson
Song Collection: Variations of Greek Themes
An Inscription by the Sea
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Calvary
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Doricha
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Eight Songs of Translations of Latin & Greek
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Howard Mumford Jones
Eutychides
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Edwin Arlington Robinson
Luke Havergal
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Miniver Cheevy
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Richard Cory
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Charles Naginski
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The Dark Hills
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The Dust of Timas
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The Old Story
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To-Morrow
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Books
Sheet Music
Eight Songs of Translations of Latin and Greek Poets
Composer(s): John Duke
Buy via Recital PublicationsEight Songs of Translations of Latin and Greek Poets (WorldCat)
Composer(s): John Duke
Find at your local libraryRichard Cory & Selected Songs
Composer(s): John Duke
Song(s): Richard Cory
Calvary
Luke Havergal
Miniver Cheevy
Bells in the Rain
Velvet Shoes
Viennese Waltz
Evening
Just-Spring
When I Set Out for Lyonnesse
Yellow Hair
Morning in Paris
In the Fields
The Mountains Are Dancing
Spring Thunder
Be Still As You Are Beautiful
One Red Rose
O World
The Song of Wandering Aengus
Brown Penny
Voice Type: Mixed
Buy via Carl Fischer Music