Extra Biographical Information: Introduction to Tilbury Town (pdf) Macmillan
It wasn't until half a year into his life that the youngest Robinson child was given a name. A visitor to the family's house in the small Maine town of Head Tide suggested Edwin and his mother liked it so much that she added as his middle name the town in Massachusetts where the namer was from.
Edwin Arlington Robinson was born on December 22, 1869 the son of Edward and Mary Palmer Robinson. Within a year the family, through Edward's land-speculating success, moved to a large white Victorian home on the corner of Lincoln and Danforth streets in Gardiner. There Edward became the director of the bank and also a member of the school board. Located on the Kennebec River and consisting of about 4500 people, Gardiner was a bustling industrial city whose economy centered around lumbering and ice-exporting.
Edwin took after his mother Mary, tall and delicate. Mary was uneducated, and it is thought that she had little influence in young Edwin's poetical inclinations besides worrying that Edwin would not be able to support himself when he grew up.
Edwin had two older brothers, Horace Dean and Herman. Dean was the oldest: seven years older than Herman and twelve years older than Edwin. He was trained as a doctor, and was little Edwin's hero. Herman was a spitting image of his father, and so became a business man.
At the age of five Edwin started in at a private school at a neighbors house. His delight with words as he learned to read had him pronouncing them again and again for his parents and other adults.
Edwin's first taste of poetry may have come from his father Edward, a "big man with fine, easy bearing", who read sometimes from William Cullen Bryant's Library of Poetry and Song. With Mary playing piano, Edward would also sing to the household, and may have been an audible influence if not a direct one.
Edwin started writing poetry around the age of twelve, about the time that his father sent him to public school. He later wrote to a friend, "Writing has been my dream ever since I was old enough to lay a plan for an air castle".
In his high-school years Edwin continued to write poetry under the instruction of another neighbor, Dr. Schuman. It is Dr. Schuman who probably introduced many of the intricacies of poetry to Robinson, although he wasn't too prolific himself. Dr. Schuman took Edwin to the meetings of the Gardiner Poetry Society, where he never said anything, but "listened intently the whole evening".
He was also dabbling in other languages, most notably Latin. He was translating Cicero, and writing French villanelles, reading Virgil in the high school laboratory with his friends Arthur Gledhill and Ed Moore. They called themselves the "group of three".
When Edwin was a senior in high school, a new principal decided that the instruction during the previous years had been inferior. Because of this, Edwin's class (the class of 1887) was to complete another year. One of Edwin's lifelong friends, Harry Deforest Smith, left the school. Edwin and the other two of his close friends, Ed Moore and Arthur Gledhill, remained.
This extra year was an interesting year for Edwin. It was during this year that he began attending dance school where he met Emma Shepherd, a beautiful woman four years his senior. Emma was from Farmingdale, the town just north on the Kennebec River. Edwin began making the walk to her house to share his poetry with her, and she encouraged him in his efforts.
There is some debate as to how much this new relationship affected Edwin. Robinson's biographers differ greatly on this subject. Truly there must have been mutual affection on some level but the truth may never be known.
The romantic view is that Edwin loved Emma for his whole life. In his 1965 biography Where the Light Falls, Chard Powers Smith, a friend of Robinson's during his later years, claims that Robinson's poetry points to a one true love that must have been Emma.
Regardless of whether or not Edwin loved Emma Shepherd, he couldn't have her. Soon after he introduced her to his family, Emma caught the attention of Edwin's older brother Herman. Herman was more worldly than Edwin, and was the same age as Emma. Within two years they were married. Neither Edwin nor his other brother Dean attended the wedding.
In the fall of 1891, at the age of 21, Edwin entered Harvard as a special student. He took classes on English, French, Shakespeare, and one on Anglo-Saxon that he later dropped. His mission was not to get all A's, as he wrote his friend Harry Smith, "B, and in that vicinity, is a very comfortable and safe place to hang".
His real desire was to get published in one of the Harvard literary journals. Within the first fortnight of being there, Robinson's Ballade of a Ship was published in the Harvard Advocate, a journal of less stature than the heralded Harvard Monthly. He was even invited to meet with the editors, but when he returned he complained to his friend Mowry Saben, "I sat there among them, unable to say a word". Robinson's literary career had false-started.
After Edwin's first year at Harvard the family endured what they knew was coming. His father Edward had died. He was buried at the top of the street in Oak Grove Cemetery in a plot purchased for the family.
In the fall Edwin returned to Harvard for a second year, but it was to be his last one as a student there. Though short, his stay in Cambridge included some his most cherished experiences, and it was there that he made his most lasting friendships. He wrote his friend Harry Smith on June 21, 1893:
"I suppose this is the last letter I shall ever write you from Harvard. The thought seems a little queer, but it cannot be otherwise. Sometimes I try to imagine the state my mind would be in had I never come here, but I cannot. I feel that I have got comparatively little from my two years, but still, more than I could get in Gardiner if I lived a century."
Robinson was back in Gardiner by mid-summer, 1893. He had plans to start writing seriously. In October he wrote his friend Gledhill:
"Writing has been my dream ever since I was old enough to lay a plan for an air castle. Now for the first time I seem to have something like a favorable opportunity and this winter I shall make a beginning."
With his father gone, Edwin became the man of the household. He farmed their plot of land, and much to his surprise he liked it. He was often too exhausted to write after a long days work.
Edwin self-published his first book The Torrent and the Night Before. He paid 100 dollars for 500 copies. It was meant to be a surprise for his mother. Days before the copies arrived, however, Mary Palmer Robinson died of diptheria. She never got to see her son's published poetry.
