SOURCE: “Edwin Arlington Robinson: Defeat and Triumph,” in New England Writers and Writing, edited by Donald W. Faulkner, University Press of New England, 1996, pp. 127-33.

In the following essay, originally published in 1948, Cowley presents an overview of Robinson's career and achievement.

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It was in October 1902, not long before his thirty-third birthday, that Edwin Arlington Robinson's third book of poems appeared. He counted on it to rescue him from the furnished room on West Twenty-third Street, in Manhattan, where he lived in fear of meeting his landlord.

His first book, or rather pamphlet, had been printed at his own expense in 1896, when he was still in Gardiner, Maine, the “Tilbury Town” of his poems. The second, called The Children of the Night, had been issued in 1897 by one of the “vanity publishers” who earn their profits by charging authors for the privilege of having their work appear between stiff...