Edwin Arlington Robinson EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON was the poet of an audience fit and few until the publication of his collected works, the fruit of twenty-five years, in 1921. In that year he received the so-called Pulitzer prize (Pulitzer himself did not provide for an award for poetry), and the tide of public recognition set in. Mr. Robinson has never been a facile writer and frequent publisher, the collected poems of a quarter-century filling less than 600 pages, but wider recognition does seem to have quickened his pen. The collected poems were followed in 1923 by "Roman Bartholow," a long narrative poem of a man, his wife, and a friend; and this volume was followed in 1924 by "The Man Who Died Twice," a narrative study in religious experience which brought its author for a second time the Pulitzer prize. And in 1925 appeared "Dionysus in Doubt," a collection of shorter poems which contain some fine sonnets and in which Mr. Robinson, possibly feeling nearer to a large audience than hitherto, publishes two poems dealing with modern tendencies in our life: "Dionysus in Doubt" and "Demos and Dionysus." It would be unfair to say, as I heard one critic say, that these poems were written |