2 Quotes & Sayings By Edward Arlington Robinson
Edward Arlington Robinson was an American poet who excelled in fields of both literature and music. Born in New York City, he was the youngest of five children of James A. Robinson, a lawyer, and his wife, Maria (née Aronow) Robinson. He grew up on Park Avenue in Manhattan, where his family had moved from rural New Jersey when his father took a government job there. After attending Columbia Grammar School, he studied at Harvard University, intending to become a schoolmaster
He began writing poetry while at Harvard but did not publish until after he was expelled for his involvement in student unrest in 1903. He went to Europe to write for magazines and later returned to the U.S., where he married Genevieve (née Marx) Hill in 1904. They had two sons, one of whom died in infancy; the other died in World War II, during the Battle of Normandy.
Robinson's first major work was "Toll Gate"; it appeared in 1917 and received praise from many prominent Americans including William Dean Howells (who included him in "Strand Magazine"'s celebration of American poets), John Galsworthy (who said that it "showed how deep is the vein of genius running through American life"), and Edmund Wilson (who called it "as fine a poem as ever came out of America"). Robinson subsequently published over 40 books of poetry and short stories including the volume "The Lion" (1924), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1925. The collection also won acclaim from T. S.
Eliot, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams among many others; it has been compared with Emily Dickinson's "The Complete Poems" (1890).
Robinson's sonnet sequence "The Bridge", which appeared in 1931, chronicles a day's journey through Brooklyn Bridge on foot—a personal connection with the poem's subject matter that was noted by critics of all political persuasions at the time of its publication—and was considered a masterpiece by poet W. H. Auden during his lifetime. Robinson worked as a journalist from 1906 to 1928 by contributing to newspapers such as the "New York World", "New York Evening Post" and "New York Sun".
In addition to his poetry writings, he wrote several books of political commentary on American social issues such as immigration and race relations: "The Case Against Immigration" (1902), "Race