SOURCE: “Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tilbury Town Poems and William James,” in Dalhousie Review, Vol. 71, No. 4, Winter 1991/92, pp. 411-37.

In the following essay, Blumenthal traces the influence of the ideas of William James on Robinson's poetry.

I

The philandering John Evereldown, the alcoholic Mr. Flood, and best-known of all, the publicly successful and privately suicidal Richard Cory, all these, like many of Tilbury Town's denizens, retain for the reader a remarkable vividness despite the modest reputation of their creator, Edwin Arlington Robinson: few students of American literature or modern poetry are required to read him. Born in 1869 in Head Tide, Maine, where his father Edward Robinson made his fortune in the logging industry, the poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, moved in that same year with his family to nearby Gardiner, the village which Robinson re-created in the parochial and repressive Tilbury Town of his early short poems. In the discursive...