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Edwin Arlington Robinson
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Edwin Arlington Robinson Poems
- Richard Cory Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people...
- A Happy Man When these graven lines you see, Traveller, do ...
- An Old Story Strange that I did not know him then. That ...
- Mr. Flood's Party Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night ...
- The House On The Hill They are all gone away, The house is ...
- Ballad Of Dead Friends As we the withered ferns By the ...
- Amaryllis Once, when I wandered in the woods alone, An old ...
Edwin Arlington Robinson was an American poet who won three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
Biography
Robinson was born in Head Tide, Lincoln County, Maine, but his family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1870. He described his childhood in Maine as "stark and unhappy": his parents, having wanted a girl, did not name him until he was six months old, when they visited a holiday resort; other vacationers decided that he should have a name, and selected a man from Arlington, Massachusetts to draw a name out of a hat.
Robinson's early difficulties led many of his poems to have a dark pessimism and his stories to deal with "an American dream gone ... more »
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Richard Cory
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
'Good-morning,' and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich - yes, richer than a king -
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went ...
Silence
If silence is to avoid the restless crowd
but go todepths where mystery abounds
then return with kerygma loud
tis not silence but heavenly sounds
The poem A Happy Man is an example for me of poorly sounding, but a metrically correct poem. One more proof that it is not a form but a final pleasing outcome that makes any art valuable.