Does anyone read Robinson any more? He was very popular early in the century, publishing his Collected Poems on this day in 1921 (see Today In Literature). He won three Pulitzers.
I have two Robinson stories, the first embarrassing. As a freshman at Cal Tech, before I took much interest in literature, I had to write an essay for an English class in which I explicated the Robinson poem "Mr. Flood's Party." I had a hard time making sense of this old guy on a hill, drinking, looking at two moons (i.e. seeing double). And then the light went on: Mars has two moons! There's a science nerd for you. So I wrote my essay about how the action was taking place on Mars and so on, and the Eng. prof., under his C grade, scribbled that this was the most inventive interpretation of the poem he had ever read.
Well, I learned to be a better reader of poetry than this. In the Senior Honors Program at UCLA, I wrote for my thesis a very long paper explicating Robinson's three booklength poems built around the Arthurian cycle. You've come a long way, baby.
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