E. A. Robinson

In his day, E. A. Robinson was a popular and accessible poet:

Edwin Arlington Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry three times: in 1922 for his first Collected Poems, in 1925 for The Man Who Died Twice, and in 1928 for Tristram (Wikipedia)

Tristram was the third of his Arthurian trilogy, 3 book length poems: Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), Tristram (1927), an ambitious project for a poet some considered, and still consider, "popular" rather than "serious." I did my UCLA Honors English Thesis on this trilogy.

Robinson's poems used to be included in high school anthologies, poems about Mr. Flood or Richard Cory or Miniver Cheevy. Maybe they still are. Who can forget:

     Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
     Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
     Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
     And kept on drinking.

Or:

     So on we worked, and waited for the light,
     And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
     And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
     Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Popularity in high school does not lead to popularity in the critical establishment of academia, and Robinson was seldom taken as seriously as I took him in my honors thesis. The book length poems of the trilogy are accessible, yes, but they also are thought-provoking in their themes. Reading around through the books today, I find I still admire the craft, accessible as it is, and admire the ambition and achievement of the trilogy. I can't remember a thing I said about it in my UCLA thesis but that's no matter. This is good stuff, and Robinson, like so many ignored writers between the great wars, deserves rediscovery by readers, old and new.