Member, the National Academy of Arts and Letters

Year
1927
Biography

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born on Dec. 22, 1869, at Head Tide in Maine and until 1897 lived at the family home in Gardiner, Maine, aside from several years as a student at Harvard University. For the rest of his life he moved in New York and devoted his life to writing poetry. Robinson earned a small living first as a subway inspector and then in the city's customs office. He resided in rooms at boarding houses in New York and Yonkers, at the Hotel Judson on Washington Square, in Brooklyn at 810 Washington Ave., and at last on West 42nd Street. His Collected Poems in 1922 received the Pulitzer Prize and earned him a degree as Doctor of Literature at Yale University. Although best known for his short poems, long poems such as Captain Craig (1902), Lancelot (1920), The Man Who Died Twice (1924), and Tristram (1927) earned him acclaim from his peers. The last two of these won Pulitzer Prizes in 1925 and 1927, when he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters. Robinson never married but enjoyed the company of many friends. He died of cancer in hospital in New York on April 6, 1935. Hermann Hagedorn's Edwin Arlington Robinson: a Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1938; PS 3535 O25Z67 Robarts Library) is the standard life. See Charles Beecher Hogan's A Bibliography of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936) for a chronology, a list of publications, and an index of poems with dates.