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As my classmate said he was one of the most prolific major American poets of the
twentieth century, Edwin Arlington Robinson is, ironically, best remembered for
only a handful of short poems,” stated Robert Gilbert in the Concise Dictionary of
American Literary Biography. Fellow writer Amy Lowell declared in the New York
Times Book Review, “Edwin Arlington Robinson is poetry. I can think of no other
living writer who has so consistently dedicated his life to his work.” Robinson is
considered unique among American poets of his time for his devotion to his art; he
published virtually nothing during his long career except poetry. “The expense of
Robinson’s single-mindedness,” Gilbert explained, “was virtually everything else in
life for which people strive, but it eventually won for him both fortune and fame, as
well as a firm position in literary history as America’s first important poet of the
twentieth century.”

Robinson seemed destined for a career in business or the sciences. He was the
third son of a wealthy New England merchant, a man who had little use for the fine
arts. He was, however, encouraged in his poetic pursuits by a neighbor and wrote
copiously, experimenting with verse translations from Greek and Latin poets. In
1891 Edward Robinson provided the funds to send his son to Harvard partly
because the aspiring writer required medical treatment that could best be
performed in Boston. There Robinson published some poems in local newspapers
and magazines and, as he later explained in a biographical piece published
in Colophon, collected a pile of rejection slips “that must have been one of the
largest and most comprehensive in literary history.” Finally he decided to publish
his poems himself, and contracted with Riverside, a vanity press, to produce The
Torrent and The Night Before, named after the first and last poems in the
collection.

In the poems of The Torrent and The Night Before, Robinson experimented with
elaborate poetic forms and explored themes that would characterize much of his
work—”themes of personal failure, artistic endeavor, materialism, and the
inevitability of change,” according to Gilbert. He also established a style
recognizably his own: an adherence to traditional forms at a time when most poets
were experimenting with the genre (“All his life Robinson strenuously objected to
free verse,” Gilbert remarked, “replying once when asked if he wrote it, ‘No, I write
badly enough as it is.’”), and laconic, everyday speech.

Robinson mailed copies of The Torrent and The Night Before out “to editors of
journals and to writers who he thought might be sympathetic to his work,” said
Gilbert. The response was generally favorable, although perhaps the most
significant review came from Harry Thurston Peck, who commented unfavorably in
the Bookman on Robinson’s bleak outlook and sense of humor. Peck found
Robinson’s tone too grim for his tastes, saying that “the world is not beautiful to
[Robinson], but a prison-house.” “I am sorry that I have painted myself in such
lugubrious colours,” Robinson wrote in the next issue of the Bookman, responding
to this criticism. “The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual
kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the
wrong blocks.”