The best of Edwin Arlington Robinson's poetry rings with a lyrical and emotional purity and singularity that should assure his place as one of the treasured poets of his generation ... Scott Donaldson's book should help to revive appreciation for this solitary figure and the unique resonance of his work. --W.S. Merwin.

This volume contains 189 hitherto unpublished letters by Edwin Arlington Robinson. They were written between 1897 and 1930 to one of his first admirers, Edith Brower of Pennsylvania. The letters begin when the twenty-seven-year-old poet writes gratefully to the stranger who has expressed appreciation of his first, privately printed, book of poems, The Torrent and the Night Before. Soon he was carrying on an intense correspondence, baring his soul--safely, he believed, because the woman he described as "infernally bright and not at all ugly," with "something of a literary reputation," was "too old to give me a chance to bother myself with any sentimental uneasiness." (She was twenty-one years his senior.) Continually reflecting his laconic, self-deprecating Yankee spirit, the letters range from the uncontrollable outpourings of a lonely individual, desperate for encouragement and understanding, to brief words of greeting or farewell. Without reserve, Robinson--who was eventually awarded the Pulitzer prize for poetry three times--confides his reactions to people and places, his thoughts about his own work, and his personal opinions of such writers as Browning, Dickens, Hardy, Moody, and Pater. Mr. Cary has included Miss Brower's unpublished memoir on the poet's character and literary career, "Memories of Edwin Arlington Robinson," and her penetrating review of The Children of the Night. In addition to an informative Introduction, he contributes full explanatory notes, a list of Robinson's works, and an index.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was the first of the great American modernist poets."No poet ever understood loneliness and separateness better than Robinson," James Dickey has observed. Robinson's lyric poems illuminate the hearts and minds of the most unlikely subjects—the downtrodden, the bereft, and the misunderstood. Even while writing in meter and rhyme, he used everyday language with unprecedented power, wit, and sensitivity. With his keen understanding of ordinary people and a gift for harnessing the rhythms of conversational speech, Robinson created the vivid character portraits for which he is best known, among them "Aunt Imogen," "Isaac and Archibald," "Miniver Cheevy," and "Richard Cory." Most of his poems are set in the fictive Tilbury Town—based on his boyhood home of Gardiner, Maine—but his work reaches far beyond its particular locality in its focus on struggle and redemption in human experience.