Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in Head Tide, Maine, in 1869 and grew up in the nearby town of Gardiner, which would subtly influence his poetry throughout his life. He spent two years at Harvard in the early 1890s, but financial issues within his family forced him to return to Maine before he could complete his degree. After his father's death and the family's financial collapse, Robinson faced significant poverty during his early adulthood, writing poems that went largely unnoticed.
He released his first collection, *The Torrent and the Night Before*, in 1896, funding it himself. Although a second collection followed, he still remained largely ignored by the public. His breakthrough came unexpectedly when President Theodore Roosevelt discovered Robinson's work, appreciated it, and helped him secure a customs-house position in New York, allowing him to continue writing. That kind of support may seem outdated today, but it was crucial in sustaining Robinson as a poet during a time when he might have otherwise given up.
“Robinson never married and led a notoriously private life, spending his summers at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, an artist retreat that became a near home for him.”
His quiet and solitary nature is evident in his poetry, reflected in the lonely characters he portrayed and the small-town experiences he observed with clear-eyed realism and no sentimentality.
The accolades that had once eluded him eventually came in abundance. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry three times — for *Collected Poems* in 1922, *The Man Who Died Twice* in 1925, and *Tristram* in 1928 — and received four nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature. By the time of his death in 1935, he was one of America's most celebrated poets, although his reputation significantly diminished afterward.
