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三次普利策奖的获得者——埃德温·阿林顿·罗宾逊（Edwin Arlington Robinson，1869—1935）曾经生活在纽约，“在一所凄凉的房屋五楼肮脏的小单间里”，多年来从他的诗歌里“一年从来没有赚到100美元以上”。
诗人在缅因州的加德纳——他诗歌里的民间风味的小镇被抚养长大，1891年，他考入哈佛大学，两年后从哈佛辍学回到这里，当时家庭财产在减少。1896年他出版了一本诗歌小册子《激流与昨天》。一年后出版《黑夜的孩子们》。
此后不久，罗宾逊作为一个地铁检察员在纽约工作，当时西奥多·罗斯福总统热血沸腾地在《展望》里引用他的诗歌，找到他，任命他为纽约海关的职员。不久罗宾逊为了写作放弃这个职位。因为在第二个十年里，一年从来没有从他的诗歌赚到100美元以上。1914年的一天，他没钱吃早餐。那天，邮件到了，带给他一封信说一个老朋友留给他4000美元。“此时”，罗宾逊说：“我想我可以生活100万年了。”
后来情况好转，公众开始认可一位真正的诗人。他坚持写作，生活简朴，冬天在波士顿和纽约，夏天在彼得伯勒麦克道威尔文艺营、新汉普郡。他的朋友说他是一个阴郁的、谦虚而博学的人，一个和善的宿命论者，一个害羞而温文尔雅的不可知论者。他喜爱侦探故事、魔鬼、广播剧，吉尔伯特和沙利文。
在很多授予埃德温·阿林顿·罗宾逊的荣誉中，除因《诗集》《死两回的人》《崔斯特瑞姆》获得三次普利策奖外，1922年和1925年他先后被耶鲁大学和鲍登学院授予文学博士学位，还是美国艺术和文学学会与国家艺术和文学院成员，获得美国艺术和文学学会金质奖章。
他的作品有：《激流与昨天》（1896，私下印刷），《黑夜的孩子们》（1897），《队长克雷格》（1902），《下游的镇》（1910），《空中翱翔的人》（1916），《灰背隼》（1917），《三家旅馆》（1920），《雅芳的收成》（1921），《诗集》（1921，1924，1927），《罗马人巴塞罗》（1923），《死两回的人》（1924），《疑惑的狄奥尼索斯》（1925），《崔斯特瑞姆》（1927），《十四行诗，1889—1927》（1928），《卡文德尔的房子》（1929），《莫德雷德，一个片断》（1929），《夜莺的荣耀》（1930），《诗集》（布利斯·佩里编，1931），《门口的马提亚》（1931），《尼苛德摩》（1932），《特利佛》（1933），《不凋花》（1934）。
The third son of a wealthy New England merchant, Robinson seemed destined for a career in business or the sciences. His father did not encourage his son’s literary talents, but Robinson wrote copiously as a young man, experimenting with verse translations from Greek and Latin poets. In 1891 Edward Robinson provided the funds to send his son to Harvard partly because the aspiring writer required medical treatment that could best be performed in Boston. There Robinson published some poems in local newspapers and magazines and, as he later explained in a biographical piece published in Colophon, collected a pile of rejection slips “that must have been one of the largest and most comprehensive in literary history.” Finally he decided to publish his poems himself, and contracted with Riverside, a vanity press, to produce The Torrent and The Night Before, named after the first and last poems in the collection.
Robinson mailed copies of The Torrent and The Night Before out “to editors of journals and to writers who he thought might be sympathetic to his work,” said Gilbert. The response was generally favorable, although perhaps the most significant review came from Harry Thurston Peck, who commented unfavorably in the Bookman on Robinson’s bleak outlook and sense of humor. Peck found Robinson’s tone too grim for his tastes, saying that “the world is not beautiful to [Robinson], but a prison-house.” “I am sorry that I have painted myself in such lugubrious colours,” Robinson wrote in the next issue of the Bookman, responding to this criticism. “The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”
Encouraged by the largely positive critical reaction, Robinson quickly produced a second manuscript, The Children of the Night (1897), which was also published by a vanity press, a friend providing the necessary funds. Unfortunately, reviewers largely ignored it; Gilbert suggests that they were put off by the vanity imprint. In 1902, two friends persuaded the publisher Houghton Mifflin to publish Captain Craig, another book of Robinson’s verse, by promising to subsidize part of the publishing costs. Captain Craig was neither a popular nor a critical success, and for several years Robinson neglected poetry, drifting from job to job in New York City and the Northeast. He took to drinking heavily, and for a time it seemed that he would, as Gilbert put it, fall “into permanent dissolution, as both his brothers had done.” “His whimsical ‘Miniver Cheevy,’” Gilbert continued, “the poem about the malcontent modern who yearned for the past glories of the chivalric age and who finally ‘coughed, and called it fate/And kept on drinking,’ is presumably a comic self-portrait.”
Robinson’s luck changed in 1904, when Kermit Roosevelt brought The Children of the Night to the attention of his father, President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt not only persuaded Charles Scribner’s Sons to republish the book, but also reviewed it himself for the Outlook (“I am not sure I understand ‘Luke Havergal,’” he said, “but I am entirely sure that I like it”), and obtained a sinecure for its author at the New York Customs House—a post Robinson held until 1909. The 2,000 dollar annual stipend that went with the post provided Robinson with financial security. In 1910, he repaid his debt to Roosevelt in The Town down the River (1910), a collection of poems dedicated to the former president.
Perhaps the best known of Robinson’s poems are those now called the Tilbury Town cycle, named after the small town “that provides the setting for many of his poems and explicitly links him and his poetry with small-town New England, the repressive, utilitarian social climate customarily designated as the Puritan ethic,” explained W. R. Robinson in Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poetry of the Act. These poems also expound some of Robinson’s most characteristic themes: “his curiosity,” as Gerald DeWitt Sanders and his fellow editors put it in Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America, “about what lies behind the social mask of character, and … his dark hints about sexuality, loyalty, and man’s terrible will to defeat himself.”
Tilbury Town is first mentioned in “John Evereldown,” a ballad collected in The Torrent and The Night Before. John Evereldown, out late at night, is called back to the house by his wife, who is wondering why he wants to walk the long cold miles into town. He responds, “God knows if I pray to be done with it all/But God’s no friend of John Evereldown./So the clouds may come and the rain may fall,/the shadows may creep and the dead men crawl,—/But I follow the women wherever they call,/And that’s why I’m going to Tilbury Town.”
Tilbury Town reappears at intervals throughout Robinson’s work. The title poem in Captain Craig concerns an old resident of the town whose life, believed wasted by his neighbors, proves to have been of value. The Children of the Night contains the story of Richard Cory, “a gentleman from sole to crown,/Clean favored, and imperially slim,” who “one calm summer night,/Went home and put a bullet through his head,” and Tilbury Town itself is personified in the lines “In fine, we thought that he was everything/ To make us wish that we were in his place.” The Man against the Sky—according to Gilbert, Robinson’s “most important single volume,” and probably his most critically acclaimed—includes the story of the man “Flammonde,” one of the poet’s most anthologized Tilbury verses.
Despite the fact that much of Robinson’s verse dealt with failed lives, several critics see his work as life-affirming. May Sinclair, writing an early review of Captain Craig for the Fortnightly Review, said of the Captain, “He, ragged, old, and starved, challenges his friends to have courage and to rejoice in the sun.” Amy Lowell, in her Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, stated, “I have spoken of Mr. Robinson’s ‘unconscious cynicism.’ It is unconscious because he never dwells upon it as such, never delights in it, nor wraps it comfortably about him. It is hardly more than the reverse of the shield of pain, and in his later work, it gives place to a great, pitying tenderness. ‘Success through Failure,’ that is the motto on the other side of his banner of ‘Courage.’” And Robert Frost, in his introduction to Robinson’s King Jasper, declared, “His theme was unhappiness itself, but his skill was as happy as it was playful. There is that comforting thought for those who suffered to see him suffer.”
Many Tilbury Town verses were among the poems Robinson included in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Poems of 1922. He won his second poetry Pulitzer in 1924, this time for The Man Who Died Twice, the story of a street musician whose one musical masterpiece is lost when he collapses after a night of debauchery. Gilbert attributed the poem’s success to its “combination of down-to-earth diction, classical allusion, and understated humor.” In 1927, Robinson again won a Pulitzer for his long narrative poem Tristram, one in a series of poems based on Arthurian legends. Tristram proved to be Robinson’s only true popular success—it was that rarity of 20th-century literature, a best-selling book-length poem—and it received critical acclaim as well. “It may be said not only that ‘Tristram’ is the finest of Mr. Robinson’s narrative poems,” wrote Lloyd Morris in the Nation, “but that it is among the very few fine modern narrative poems in English.”
Early in 1935, Robinson fell ill with cancer. He stayed hospitalized until his death, correcting galley proofs of his last poem, King Jasper, only hours before slipping into a final coma. “Magazines and newspapers throughout the country took elaborate notice of Robinson’s death,” declared Gilbert, “reminding their readers that he had been considered America’s foremost poet for nearly 20 years and praising his industry, integrity, and devotion to his art.”
“It may come to the notice of our posterity (and then again it may not),” wrote Robert Frost in his introduction to King Jasper, “that this, our age, ran wild in the quest of new ways to be new. … Robinson stayed content with the old-fashioned ways to be new. … Robinson has gone to his place in American literature and left his human place among us vacant,” Frost concluded. “We mourn, but with the qualification that, after all, his life was a revel in the felicities of language.”