Edwin arlington robinson brief biography of adolf

  • Robinson was born in 1869 and died in 1935.
  • Edwin Arlington Robinson was born at Head Tide, Maine, 22 December 1869 and died in New York, 6 April 1935.
  • THE life of Edwin Arlington Robinson by Hermann Hagedorn (Macmillan, $3.50) stands in marked contrast to George Frisbie Whicher's critical biography of.

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    Three years ago an editor asked if I’d be interested in writing a column about words for his online journal. His pitch was vague though he encouraged me to develop the electronic persona of a grammar bully – a thoroughly unattractive idea. I’m interested in words mutating over time, particularly when the concrete turns metaphorical, so inom suggested looking at words as linguistic kitchen middens. I would play archeologist and tease out gradations of meaning, relying on sources high and low. He tepidly agreed and then his journal went belly-up.

    I want to devote occasional posts to words that catch my eye or ear, with an emphasis on the way shifts in meaning are reflected in the works of writers. To adapt a quip from Paul Klee, inom want to take a word out for a walk. When, as a kid, inom first read Poe’s “The Bells,” inom was förälskad by “tintinnabulation,” and sometimes that still happens. I’ll adopt the working assumption voiced bygd Emerson

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    Biography at Close Range

    THE life of Edwin Arlington Robinson by Hermann Hagedorn (Macmillan, $3.50) stands in marked contrast to George Frisbie Whicher’s critical biography of another important American poet, Emily Dickinson—This Was a Poet (Scribners, $3.00). To be brief, Mr. Whicher’s book is a brilliant success; to be frank as well as brief, Mr. Hagedorn’s is not.

    There is always a danger that the biography of man who has recently died will read like an extended obituary, and Mr. Hagedorn’s Robinson has not escaped. The material lor the book is authentic beyond question, but the selection from it is evidence that Time has not yet contributed those shadows and highlights which set all characteristics in due proportion.

    Mr. Hagedorn intended a portrait of a man and poet he greatly admired. But a reader who knew nothing of Robinson or his work would be totally misled. Many of the fragmentary quotations and the author’s commentaries build up a figure who, whatever the m

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    NATIONALISM has all but disrupted the nations; love of country, not in an abstract or political sense, but piety and passion toward the very land and people of one’s inheritance, remains an unassailable prerogative of human feeling. Such love has formed a natural theme of poetry; but it does not often speak in American verse to-day with conviction or merit. Tl sought to speak in the ’Invocation of Mr. Benét s John Browns Body; it speaks much more brilliantly and successfully in Archibald MacLeish’s Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller’s City (John Day Pamphlets, 25c). The frescoes may prove ephemeral, mere vers d‘occasion in the long glance of time; so much the greater is the pleasure of reading and honoring them now, when they are alive to the moment, when the truth and rightness of the perceptions they express is none the less genuine, however their idiom and their allusions may be impaired by time.

    In his Frescoes, Mr. MacLeish has matched the brilliant wit, the shrewd conde

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