![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When they were finally prevailed upon to do so, at a lawn party in the summer of 1870, they held a contest to name him by lot. His parents had been hoping for a girl, and such was their disappointment that they neglected to name the child for many months. Born in 1869 in Head Tide, Maine, Robinson was the third in a family of three boys. As the poet Robert Mezey recalls in his edition of Robinson’s poems-and as Scott Donaldson, in his recent biography of the poet, describes in detail-the facts of the poet’s life would not seem a recipe for contentment. Robinson ever did know happiness should be a cause of wonder. That you have enrolled in a poetry course-by choice, no less-automatically makes you a rare breed, I tell my class. With this sobering figure in his head, the aspirant poet twisted his flask and took another drink. Tracy has speculated that this proportion is about right today, as well.) Perhaps a tenth of a percent of Americans appreciate poetry. Robinson estimated that the proportion held for the entire country. In Gardiner, where he lived, six persons read poetry out of a population of 6,000 there was about an equal number of drunks. A flask in hand, he watched the waves and considered the prospects of his chosen career. This first great American poet of the 20th century, I begin, once stared out from the coast of Maine at the dark Atlantic waters stretching into the horizon’s gloom. Every semester, on the first day of the poetry courses I teach, I hold up Lilla Cabot Perry’s portrait of Edwin Arlington Robinson and tell the students an only slightly embellished anecdote. ![]()
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