Mr. Robinson was born at Head Tide, Maine, on 22 December, 1869. His father was a grain merchant in this village, but, his business interests expanding, he removed with his family, about 1872, to the neighboring town of Gardiner, on the Kennebec River. Here Mr. Robinson passed his boyhood and youth, and this is the Tilbury Town of his poems. In 1891 he entered Harvard College, but was able to remain there only two years; and his father's ill health combined with reverses in business now forced him to make his own way without help. He had already determined upon poetry as his life's work, and from 1893 until 1905 he struggled in various ways to earn his living in New York, while writing and publishing his three earliest volumes of verse. His first volume, The Torrent and the Night Before (1896), was privately printed. In 1897 he published The Children of the Night, and in 1902 Captain Craig. Neither of these volumes attracted much attention from the public, but Captain Craig was warmly praised by Theodore Roosevelt, who also in 1905 gave Mr. Robinson a post in the New York Custom House. This position he held until 1910, when he published The Town down the River. Since 1910 he has been able to give his time entirely to literary work. In 1914 he published a play, Van Zorn, and in the following year a second play, The Porcupine. These plays have not aroused the enthusiasm of his critics, and it is generally felt that his dramatic ability—which is unquestioned and great-has found more congenial expression in many of his poems. And to poetry he returned in 1916, with the publication of a very striking and distinguished volume, The Man against the Sky. Two individual and significant interpretations of the matter of Arthurian legend followed in 1917 and 1920, Merlin and Lancelot, and in the latter year was published a collection of shorter pieces, The Three Taverns. In 1921 came another collection, Avon's Harvest, and in the same year Mr. Robinson's Collected Poems were published, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Two long poems have since appeared, Roman Bartholow (1923) and The Man Who Died Twice (1924; awarded the Pulitzer prize), and a collection, Dionysus in Doubt (1925). Mr. Robinson has received an honorary doctorate of letters from Yale (1922) and is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

It has been mentioned that Mr. Robinson's earlier volumes of verse did not attract much attention from the general public. Poetry in America in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth seemed to be practically a lost cause. Older poets of high reputation had died, and the most prominent of those who succeeded them were content to be followers and imitators. They found, moreover, no inspiration in the actual life or events of their country, but turned to distant lands or to dream-worlds of the fancy for their matter. Repelled by life's realities, they produced verse which was innocuous and uninteresting. They were soft-spoken, decorative, in a small way melodious; they were, in a word, the last people in the world to convince an industrial nation, enjoying an extraordinary flow of material prosperity, that poetry could contribute anything valuable to its life. The work of William Vaughn Moody, and of a few others who had positive energy, vital interests, and high courage was tentative and at times confused, and did not suffice to change the popular attitude. It was only about 1912-the year in which Poetry: A Magazine of Verse was founded that a change began really to take place, a change which has in succeeding years been marked by increasingly widespread popular interest in poetry and by the appearance of a notable body of American verse which has rewarded that interest highly. The "new poets" have been boldly experimental, attempting to evolve new forms of expression and to alter poetic diction, with consequent excursions into the bizarre which have at times excited more curiosity than interest. Bewildered themselves-when not merely in search of the sensational-they have bewildered the public. In their defense it has been urged that, form and content in artistic expression being inseparable, the new poets with new things to say have had to try to discover an appropriately new mode of utterance. This is one of those dangerous half-truths which are the standing protection of eccentricity, and it has served to obscure the important fact that the "new poets" have won for themselves a popular hearing primarily because the best of them have an independent, pertinent, and valuable criticism of life to express, and the courage and feeling to express it frankly and movingly.

This is well illustrated by Mr. Robinson's achievement. For, as has been happily said, the first discovery made by Americans newly interested in poetry during recent years was, that in Mr. Robinson they had been neglecting a poet whose achievement was so high and important as to entitle him to the

first place among recent and contemporary writers of verse. Yet, although his language and poetic form are markedly individual, and although his criticism of life is independent, pertinent, and valuable. still, he has not found it necessary to depart from the traditional forms of English versification, nor is his language violent, slovenly, bizarre, or otherwise twisted from the norm of English speech. On the contrary, his orthodox numbers have a silvery smoothness which can only be the result of the most patient, skilled, and scrupulous workmanship, and the only extraordinary qualities of his language are its simplicity, directness, and precision. It is probable, indeed, that his effort to meet the high standards created by the great tradition of English verse has, by its very difficulty, braced him to greater coherence and strength, and it may also have helped him to see what is local and temporary in terms of what is universal and permanent in human experience. At least, this he has done. Subtle, quiet, profound, uniting the essence of good breeding with the fine fruit of mature reflection, Mr. Robinson has with steady composure, regardless of merely contemporary valuations, built up in his poems a picture of life as a spiritual ordeal too searching for nearly all of us, placed as we are in an alien, chaotic world, attracted as we are, like moths, by the irrelevant, and warped by suffering. But, at the same time, he has also pictured life as good beneath all its evil, if we have the strength and insight to endure the accidents of circumstance with quietness and resignation, while we continue to possess our souls, to possess our faith in and love for justice and goodness and beauty and truth. This is the barest summary statement, but it may be sufficient to indicate the quality of Mr. Robinson's achievement-his mature disenchantment with the world of appearances, ending not in mere petulance and negation and hatred, but in a conviction, against all appearances, of the high value and destiny of human life.