![]() ![]() The process is hard but the result pays" (quoted in Anderson, p. ![]() On that score Robinson had the ready answer of an unflinching realist: "There's a good deal to live for," he wrote in a letter, "but a man has to go through hell really to find it out. The president whose favorite adjective was "bully" sponsored a poet who was widely regarded as an incurable pessimist. Thus it was that one of the most public of men in the country came to the aid of one of the most demure and reclusive. Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) was so taken by the poetry that he secured a position for Robinson in the New York Customs House, convinced Scribners to reissue the volume, and wrote an appreciative essay for the Outlook. His literary fortunes improved somewhat when Kermit Roosevelt showed his father a copy of The Children of the Night (1897). Robinson' s first volume of poetry, The Torrent and the Night Before (1896), was privately printed at his own expense, and his meager income was supplemented by an anonymous stipend donated by those who thought he showed great literary promise. For a time, however, he was considered the most gifted living American poet, whose nearest rival was T. When he died in 1935, Robinson was nearly as neglected as he had been at the beginning. Then started the slow slide into obscurity once again. With the 1916 publication of The Man against the Sky, Robinson's reputation began to improve dramatically, and by 1927 he had won three Pulitzer Prizes, was awarded two honorary doctorates, and most improbably of all, published a long narrative poem, Tristram (1927), that became a national best-seller. By 1899 he had removed to New York City, where he would live for the remainder of his life. His residence in the Maine village (the source for his imaginary Tilbury Town) was interrupted when he attended Harvard for two years as a "special student," one who had no intention of graduating. For roughly the first twenty years of his poetic life, he lived and wrote in his native Gardiner, Maine, in near-total obscurity. The course of Edwin Arlington Robinson's (1869–1935) literary career is one of the most curious and one of the saddest of any American writer. ![]()
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