Gardiner Public Library 152 Water Street, Gardiner, Me 04345 Main Desk: 207-582-3312 Children's Room: 207-582-6894 Director: 207-582-6893

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) became one of the most important poets in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, being ranked by one recent scholar with Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Crane, and Williams. He was born in the village of Head Tide in Alna, Maine but came to Gardiner, Maine with his parents the following year. His formative years were spent at the family residence of 67 Lincoln Avenue, the city's only listing on the list of National Historic Landmarks. By age twenty he knew that "I was doomed, or elected, or sentenced for life, to the writing of poetry." In Gardiner he found early mentors, including Caroline Swan, Dr. Alanson Tucker Schumann, and most importantly, Laura E. Richards. He studied at Harvard for two years until the family money was lost. In 1896 he self published The Torrent and the Night Before which he sent to reviewers and friends. In 1897 Laura E. Richards and Hays Gardiner helped him to publish Children of the Night, a work which came to the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt who became an ardent supporter of Robinson, relieving the struggling poet of the necessity of taking odd jobs in New York City. In 1911 Robinson dedicated The Town Down the River to the President. By 1911, when he was invited to the MacDowell Colony, his fortune gradually improved. In 1922 he received his first Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Collected Poems. He received two more Pulitzers, for The Man Who Died Twice (1925) and for Tristam (1928) -- a record number of Pulitzer Prizes surpassed only by Robert Frost. In all, he published twenty-eight books of poetry and several plays in his lifetime. Locally, he is remembered for his "Tilbury Poems," which although he disputed that they were about Gardiner, certainly evoke the characters found in small New England towns of the late nineteenth century -- John Everldown, Eben Flood, and Flammonde being three personalities of mythic proportions. In 1935 his ashes were interred in the family lot at the Oak Grove Cemetery in Gardiner, and the following year a committee headed by Laura E. Richards erected a monument to his memory on the city common.

For a virtual tour of Edwin Arlington Robinson's Gardiner, Maine go to our new website http://www.earobinson.com. Edited by local historian Danny Smith, the purpose of this tour guide is to give basic information about the poet Robinson and the principal places in this community where such visitors can glimpse the Tilbury Town of Robinson's life and poetry.
 

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