Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson is America's poet laureate of unhappiness. In patiently crafted verse of great sonority, he portrays men and women suffering from life's ordeals yet striving to understand and master their fates. American composers who have set Robinson's verses include Aaron Copland, John Duke, Frank Lewin, and Charles Naginski.

Photo: Edwin Arlington Robinson, public domain.

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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

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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 Publications

    Eight Songs of Translations of Latin and Greek Poets (WorldCat)

    Composer(s): John Duke

    Find at your local library

    John Duke Song Collections

    Composer(s): John Duke

    Find at your local library

    Richard Cory

    Composer(s): Charles Naginski

    Buy via Music Sales Classical

    Richard 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

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