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。
Edward Arlington Robinson was born on December 22, 1869 in Head Tide, Maine. Although he was one of the most prolific American poets of the early 20th century—and his Collected Poems (1921) won the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to poetry—he is remembered now for a few short poems. Robinson was devoted to his art and led a solitary, often make-shift existence; he published virtually nothing during his long career except poetry. Amy Lowell, a contemporary of Robinson, declared in the New York Times Book Review, “Edwin Arlington Robinson is poetry. I can think of no other living writer who has so consistently dedicated his life to his work.” In books such as The Torrent and the Night Before (1896; reprinted 1996), Captain Craig (1902; 1915), The Man Against the Sky (1916), King Jasper (1935), and particularly through the well-known Tilbury Town cycle, Robinson established a recognizable set of thematic and technical concerns: “themes of personal failure, artistic endeavor, materialism, and the inevitability of change,” characterize much of his work, according to scholar Robert Gilbert. Robinson’s use of laconic, everyday speech while also adhering to traditional forms at a time when most poets were experimenting with the genre also made his poetry unique. “All his life Robinson strenuously objected to free verse,” Gilbert remarked, “replying once when asked if he wrote it, ‘No, I write badly enough as it is.’”
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.