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Robinson Edwin Arlington
Selected Poems (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
 List Price: Price: $11.70 You Save: $3.30 (22%) DescriptionA selection of poems by American poet E.A. Robinson, perhaps best remembered in Britain for his New England character sketches. His volumes of poetry include "The Torrent", "The Night Before" and "The Children of the Night".Customer ReviewsGreat poetAn under-rated, poet, whom I'd never been told about in any American lit class. Worth reading again and again. Fine selection Robinson was a creator of trenchant mini-biographies in verse, many of which became instant classics and familiar to every schoolchild, such as "Miniver Cheevy" and "Richard Cory"--which was even referred to in a Simon and Garkunkel song in their landmark Bookends album. Sadly, such education seems to have vanished from our schools and the experience of generation X'ers in favor of MTV and video games, and their mental development is the poorer for it. But Robinson's gifts for insightful and penetrating observations of people's character, and his unique poetic style, which avoided classical norms as well as free verse, was unique and has remained unequalled. Truly a great American of letters who should be better known today. Despite our greater scientific and technological achievements, we live in a more ignorant, barbaric, and less literate age than Robinson did. This is a correction offered to Amazon. com As a Robinson scholar, I strongly recommend reading his poetry. This volume contains only a small fraction of the poet's work, but the selections are good. However, I am writing not as a review, but as a message of correction to Amazon.com: You give the author's name as EDWARD Arlington Robinson. The poet's name is EDWIN Arlington Robinson. (A common error, but for Amazon? tsk tsk.) Winifred Sullivan The poet of hard reality I first read the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson in school. They were quite surprising then and somewhat menacing. For they told of things happening to people which were not supposed to happen to them. They told of great unhappiness, often disguised. "Miniver Cheevy child of scorn, cursed the day that he was born" And Miniver of course lived for the great past which never was. Another of these characters the imperially correct Richard Cory " went home one day and put a bullet in his head." Robinson is I believe considered best as a poet when he writes these character- stories, and portraits of failure. And this when he had a whole other world of poetic works, including 'romantic poems' on Arthurian times. He was a rarity in that he considered himself a poet by vocation and dedicated himself wholly to this, despite years of poverty and frustration. He had come from a wealthy family which had in losing its fortune known many personal disasters. He was in late- career adopted by President Roosevelt who secured him a nice Melville-like customs job where he could better devote himself to writing. He chose 'Poetry' as his life even desisting from family life on the grounds that it might hurt his poetry. The poetic character sketches which tell life- stories in a few stanzas are still today powerful reading. In an analysis of his verse David Perkins writes,"If a formula could be given for a typical poem of Robinson, it would include the following elements: characterization; indirect and allusive narration; contemporary setting and recognition of the impingement of setting on individual lives; psychological realism and interest in exploring the tangles of human feelings and relationships; an onlooker or observer as speaker, making the poems impersonal and objective with respect to Robinson himself; a penchant for the humorous point of view combined with an awareness that life is more essentially tragic; a language that is colloquial, sinewy, and subtle as it conveys twists of implication in continually active thinking; a mindfulness of the difficulty of moral judgment but also a concern for it." "There was more than sound. . . more than just an axe." Like fellow New England poet Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson helped limber up traditional, rhymed American verse, steering it away from the stilted and bombastic norms of the 19th century while also avoiding free verse. More importantly, Robinson wrote about "the other half" -- drunks, dreamers, women-chasers, narcissistic suicides, jettisoned lover-boys, devastated widows, brutal misers. By doing so, he paved the way for the modernist obsesssion with the "common man". (In fact, he is still best known for his biting characterizations of Luke Havergal, Richard Cory, and Cliff Klingenhagen). A tense but satirical electricity runs through all of his work. As Frost said, "Robinson's theme was unhappiness itself, but his skill was as happy as it was playful... His life was a revel in the felicities of language." The earlier poetry is predominately concerned with failure and misery, "the withered souls of men", as Robinson put it. (Robinson wrote much this poetry while working as a ticket collector on the New York subway, not long out of Harvard). Men have paid a price for their innocence and are unable, like Zola (whom he praises in a poem) to look squarely at the "compromising chart of hell" they have created. Great democratic mobs judge each others' grief, a grief they can seldom comprehend. Writers worship "the flicker and not the flame". Misery and the passing of things toll like a villanelle in most of Robinson's early work: "There is ruin and decay," "long centuries have come and gone," the world seems to be churning toward the "western gate" of darkness, death's portal. By contrast, the more mature Robinson is more interested in light and voices and spiritual illumination. He sees great value in our intellectual and spiritual struggles, our so-called "modern" ideas, even though they may be "some day be quaint as any [tale] told / In almagest or chronicle of old." The older Robinson does not fight against the ultimately unknowable realities. He is not a disjointed Romantic raging against the misnamed "encroachments" of time. He is glad that reality remains a mystery in the end, a great and indecipherable code of silent stars and sheaves of girl-like, golden wheat that speak love in their very silence. The world, like true poetry, has "a mighty meaning of a kind / That tells the more the more it is not told." I bought this book several years ago in Malta during a bout of homesickness and it has been blowing my mind ever since. Check it out!
The Children of the Night (1897)
 List Price: Price: $8.39 DescriptionPurchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CALVARY Friendless and faint, with martyred steps and slow, Faint for the flesh, but for the spirit free, Stung by the mob that came to see the show, The Master toiled along to Calvary ; We gibed him, as he went, with houndish glee, Till his dimmed eyes for us did overflow ; We cursed his vengeless hands thrice wretchedly, — And this was nineteen hundred years ago. But after nineteen hundred years the shame Still clings, and we have not made good the loss That outraged faith has entered in his name. Ah, when shall come love's courage to be strong ! Tell me, O Lord — tell me, O Lord, how long Are we to keep Christ writhing on the cross! Dear friends, reproach me not for what I do, Nor counsel me, nor pity me ; nor say That I am wearing half my life away For bubble-work that only fools pursue. And if my bubbles be too small for you, Blow bigger then your own : the games we play To fill the frittered minutes of a day, Good glasses are to read the spirit through. And whoso reads may get him some shrewd skill; And some unprofitable scorn resign, To praise the very thing that he deplores; So, friends (dear friends), remember, if you will, The shame I win for singing is all mine, The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours. chapter{Section 4THE STORY OF THE ASHES AND THE FLAME No matter why, nor whence, nor when she came, There was her place. No matter what men said, No matter what she was ; "living or dead, Faithful or not, he loved her all the same. The story was as old as human shame, But ever since that lonely night she fled, With books to blind him, he had only read The story of the ashes and the flame. There she was always coming pretty soon To fool him back, with penitent scared eyes That had in them th...Customer Reviews"Teddy's" Favorite Book of PoetryI searched long and hard for this little volume for a couple of years--here on amazon, and also trying to special order it from Border's and Barnes & Noble--always to no avail. Finally, I was lucky enough to obtain this copy from here at amazon.com. This was Teddy Roosevelt's favorite book of verse, which led me to the search for it, as I wanted to see first hand what the Great Man liked best. You know what? It is exactly fitting and in keeping with one's love and respect for one of the greatest Americans that ever lived. And he was, indeed, a great big teddy bear. A man of enormous strength physically and also morally/spiritually, a towering figure in the history of humankind, yet a soft and gentle and kindly man whom I would think it impossible not to love as a private individual, and as a towering leader at the beginning of the century. So, I acquired this small volume, and placed it on my library shelves until the time seemed "right" to look into it. What a relevation, and quite personal "peek" into the (for lack of another term to quickly come to mind) "heart" of this great man. These little jewels are simply exquisite and so touching and warmly humanistic. One surprise is the poem that Simon & Garfunkel turned into the song "Richard Cory" on their "Sounds of Silence" album. Wonderful stuff in this little book--and also somehow an enlightening insight to the Great Man's heart. I think you'll be very pleased with this delightful little volume that sadly is, I guess, pretty much totally unknown. This wonderful collection of Edwin Arlington Robinson's works deservedly needs to be brought out into the light and enjoyed by modern readers. Trust me, it is SO worth the search to locate and acquire a copy of this marvelous book. ~operabruin
Robinson: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)
 List Price: Price: $12.50 Product Details
DescriptionEdwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was the first of the great American modernist poets."No poet ever understood loneliness and separateness better than Robinson," James Dickey has observed. Robinson's lyric poems illuminate the hearts and minds of the most unlikely subjects—the downtrodden, the bereft, and the misunderstood. Even while writing in meter and rhyme, he used everyday language with unprecedented power, wit, and sensitivity. With his keen understanding of ordinary people and a gift for harnessing the rhythms of conversational speech, Robinson created the vivid character portraits for which he is best known, among them "Aunt Imogen," "Isaac and Archibald," "Miniver Cheevy," and "Richard Cory." Most of his poems are set in the fictive Tilbury Town—based on his boyhood home of Gardiner, Maine—but his work reaches far beyond its particular locality in its focus on struggle and redemption in human experience. Customer ReviewsA Major American PoetThis is a beautiful collection, with a unique music and a striking originality. "Luke Havergal", "John Evereldown", "Calverly's", "Eros Turannos" and "Lancelot" are personal favorites, but I have barely begun to sound the depths of this wonderful collection. Robinson evokes a great many moods, from austere sorrow and longing ("Lancelot"), to haunting love poems ("Luke Havergal") to bawdy and morbid songs ("John Evereldown"). The book is solidly bound, pocket-sized and elegantly designed. I strongly recommend this edition of Robinson's poems to anyone, especially lovers of Trumbull Stickney. Oh, what a treasure! A slender volume, carefully stocked with some of Robinson's finest poems. There are some notable omissions, but the most famous ones are here; and for the price, it's a can't-lose addition to one's own library, ideal as a gift.
Collected Poems By Edwin Arlington Robinson
 List Price: Price: $43.76 You Save: $16.19 (27%) DescriptionThis scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature.Customer ReviewsWhat a superb packageE A Robinson, among the finest of American poets, shines in this realistically comprehensive collection of his poetry. Poetry being so HIGHLY subjective, I won't even attempt to sway the reader. I will point to Reuben Bright, Miniver Cheevy, Richard Cory, and the brilliant Two Gardens in Linndale. These are among the most uplifting of words woven by any American poet. Read them, weep if you must, and then BUY THIS VOLUME. It belongs on the shelf of EVERY friend of American poetry. Robinson Edwin Arlington News
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Edwin Arlington Robinson
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Edwin Arlington Robinson
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Charleston City PaperPiano Powerhouse Andrew von Oeyen Rocks St. Matthew'sThe part of the program I was most curious about was our pianist's own composition, The Mill, based on a poem of the same title by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Andrew first set these dark and unsettling verses (implying a double suicide) in the form of a
Back StageNew York Production ListingsMy Man Godfrey, a musical version of the 1936 screwball film comedy, with book by Rupert Holmes (The Mystery of Edwin Drood) and score by Mark Hollmann (Urinetown). A reading was held in Manhattan on March 6. Natural Woman, a new book musical featuring