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The Emily Dickinson Museum: A Tale of Two Houses

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In the Connecticut River Valley town of Amherst, Mass., a footpath hidden from the street connected two regal mansions overlooking Main Street. Emily Dickinson often trod that path to the house next door. It was, she said, “wide enough for two who love.”

love-nests-homestead

The Homestead

Emily lived in The Homestead, the Federal style mansion on the right. Her brother and sister-in-law lived in the Italianate mansion, The Evergreens, on the left.

For fifteen years, Emily and Susan Dickinson trod the path back and forth, exchanging poems and letters and drawings, along with flowers and treats. So did children, and servants, and friends, and Emily’s sister Lavinia and Susan’s husband Austin. The two households lived in each other’s pockets.

The Evergreens

Emily Dickinson House

Far from being a gloomy mansion sheltering a recluse, The Homestead was the setting for the Dickinsons’ warm, intimate family life. Stablehands worked in the barn between the two homes. Gardeners tended the vegetable garden and orchards. Cooks and maids ran the household, and nursemaids took care of Austin and Susan’s three children.

At night the houses stilled, but well before dawn a light would appear in the upstairs window of The Homestead. Emily had lit the lamp in her bedroom. She sat at her tiny cherrywood table and penned letters, poems, letter-poems and drawings. As a sometimes sickly girl, she had made a deal with her formidable father. He allowed her to stay in her room and write until noon. Then she’d have to help with the household chores—baking, gardening and the hated sewing.

dickinson-portrait

Retouched daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson

Over time, Emily lost interest in small talk, church service and shallow social gatherings. She wanted to wrestle with questions about nature, life and death, and to write poetry. Her extended family, her tight circle of correspondents and her friends were enough.

Once, Emily invited her niece to her bedroom. She closed the door behind them, locked it with an imaginary key and said, “This is freedom.”

Susan Dickinson

Emily sent several hundred of her poems to Susan, who understood their power. Emily considered Sue her most perceptive critic.

Sue was an accomplished woman in her own right. She invited the leading intellectuals of the age to soirees at The Evergreens. Over exquisite meals she exchanged witticisms with her guests, well-known figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wendell Phillips and Frederick Law Olmsted. Sam Bowles, editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican, was a favorite of both Susan and Emily. A few years earlier, he had tried to persuade Amherst College to honor Sue with an honorary degree for her intellect and social adroitness.

Susan Dickinson

Susan had made the The Evergreens a showplace. She filled the rooms with stylish carved furniture and covered the walls with oil paintings. On cold nights a fire crackled in a green marble fireplace. In warm months bunches of her prize-winning flowers brightened the rooms.

Interloper at The Homestead

When a vivacious young faculty wife and her astronomer husband came to town, Sue invited them to her soirees. Mabel Loomis Todd was ambitious, but neither she nor her husband had any money.

The interloper: Mabel Loomis Todd

Mabel called The Evergreens “a pleasure haven,” quite the contrast to the boardinghouse she and her husband lived in. But then she began a 13-year-passionate affair with Austin Dickinson. Sue found out, and Mabel was no longer welcome at the The Evergreens soirees.

Mabel and Austin would tryst at The Homestead. Austin would trod the path for his assignations behind closed doors in the library or the dining room. Emily and Lavinia had to put up with it — Austin handled their finances. He gave Mabel a piece of Dickinson land across Main Street and helped pay for the 13-room house she built on it.

Before Mabel started sleeping with her husband, Sue shared some of Emily’s poems with her and told her about her rare genius. Mabel ardently wished to meet Emily. Emily would have none of it. Every time Mabel sent her a gift or a note, Emily sent her a thank you note laced with sarcasm.

The first time Mabel laid eyes on Emily was in her coffin.

The Story of Emily Dickinson

Emily had wished Sue would “tell her story.”  Sue had hundreds of Emily’s poems in her possession, and wanted to bring them to the public’s attention.

But Mabel had insinuated herself into Lavinia’s good graces. She managed to get hold of more than 600 of Emily’s poems. With a Boston man of letters, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she edited three volumes of Emily’s poems and a collection of her letters. The first edition of Emily’s poems sold out in one day. Mabel rode the wave of interest in the poet by giving lectures on “her friend” Emily Dickinson.

However, Mabel had a problem: How to square the fact that she’d never met Emily with her claim that they were dear friends? How could she declare herself an expert on Emily when Emily had refused to have anything to do with her? Mabel’s solution was to portray Emily as a weird recluse. Not as someone who refused to engage with her brother’s mistress.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/mabel-loomis-todd-austin-dickinson.jpg

Austin Dickinson

Meanwhile, Austin died, and Lavinia claimed to be heir to all Emily’s poems. She blocked Sue from publishing them.

Austin wanted Mabel to inherit The Homestead and the Dickinson land across Main Street. But as Amherst’s leading citizen he couldn’t exactly put his mistress in his will. So he made Lavinia promise she’d give the property to Mabel. After he died, lavinia changed her mind. Lawsuits followed; Lavinia kept the house until she died in 1899.

The Emily Dickinson Museum

The Homestead then passed on to Sue and Austin’s daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi. She leased it until 1916 and then sold it. The owners in 1965 sold it to the trustees of Amherst College, which used it for faculty housing.

The dining room at The Homestead

Martha Dickinson lived in The Evergreens until she died in 1943. She willed the house to her co-editor and later his widow. They preserved it as it was when Sue held her soirees. The house passed on to a trust, which merged with The Homestead trustees in 2003 to create The Emily Dickinson Museum.

The Homestead has since been renovated, though The Evergreens hasn’t. The Homestead has a small gift shop, where you can buy an Emily Dickinson tote bag and a lot of books.

Five Things You’ll Remember from the Emily Dickinson Museum

You don’t have to be an Emily Dickinson fan to find The Homestead and The Evergreens interesting. Students of architecture and gardening will have much to ponder.

Her Writing Desk

Emily mostly wrote at a 17-1/2 inch writing table that stood near her window. Nothing seems to evoke Emily Dickinson’s life so much as a visit to her bedroom, to stand at her desk and to look out at the same hills she used to look at.

Her writing desk is to the right.

The Piano in the Parlor

Emily studied piano and voice, and played church hymns, carols and anthems. She also collected sheet music. When she was 20, she attended a Jenny Lind concert with her father.

Her little square piano can still be played.

The Pages on Which She Wrote Her Poems

Emily produced a huge volume of letters and poems, and copied many of them as well. The Dickinson family feud that started with Mabel Loomis Todd’s affair with Austin continued after both their deaths. As a result, Emily’s papers have gone to Harvard, to Amherst and elsewhere. But you can see some at the museum.

Her Bed

Just before the 6 p.m. whistle blew on May 15, 1886, Emily Dickinson breathed her last. She had been lying unconscious in her bed, wheezing horribly. Visitors can see the actual bed she died in.

Gravesite

Emily Dickinson fans will recognize her brevity and her wit on her gravestone, just a short walk from The Homestead. It says, “Called Back.”

About Amherst

Amherst is not only a college town, but it’s near the Berkshires’ cultural attractions: Tanglewood, Jacobs Pillow and the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

The Emily Dickinson Museum belongs to the Dickinson Historic District, which includes the old railroad station and the First Congregational Church. Amherst, home to Amherst College and UMass-Amherst, has eight other historic districts. They include the commercial downtown, the Cushman mill village, Millionaire’s Row, an old farm village, Fiddler’s Green and a historic African-American neighborhood.

If you go…

Book  a tour of the Emily Dickinson Museum in advance; the hourlong tours fill up fast. The museum is open in 2023 through December 22, and then closes during January and February.

Amherst is a busy college town, so parking can be fraught. Main Street has metered parking, and two parking garages stand two blocks from the museum.

The houses are close to downtown restaurants.

You can also take a virtual visit. Just click here.

With many thanks to Lyndall Gordon for Lives Like Loaded Guns, without which this story could not have been written. 

Images: Evergreens: By Daderot. – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1005308. Dining room: Massachusetts Office Of Travel & Tourism: via Flickr https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/.Emily Dickinson bedroom by Ben Ledbetter, Architect via Flickr CC by 2.0. Homestead (front view) by Bart Everson via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Grave: By Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003555.

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The Boyhood Home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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If ever there was a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth, it was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Yet far from using his birthright as a ticket to a dissolute life, Longfellow combined his family connections and his exceptional intellect to  become the most famous poet in the world.

Longfellow’s career began in Portland, Maine (Massachusetts at the time) where he grew up in a house originally built in 1785-1786 for his maternal grandfather, Revolutionary War general Peleg Wadsworth. The house was built in a neoclassical style of brick, one of the earliest brick structures in Maine. Originally the house had two stories, but a third story was added after a fire in 1814. That made it big enough to accommodate the large family. At times as many as 12 people lived in the house.

The Wadsworth family can trace its roots in America to the Mayflower. The Longfellow family, meanwhile, traced its roots to England via William, Henry’s great-great grandfather. He was a soldier who came to Nova Scotia as part of a British military force. Henry’s grandfather served as a judge and his father a congressman.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

These two families came together in the marriage of Stephen Longfellow and Zilpah Wadsworth, who in 1807 would take up residence in the Wadsworth home at 489 Congress Street in Portland. Henry was eight months old then. He would live there until he left for Bowdoin College at 14, and he would call it home for 35 years. Henry mastered three foreign languages and returned to Bowdoin, after touring Europe, to teach. He would later take a position at Harvard College until he gave up teaching and turned his attention to writing full time.

The house played an important role in shaping Longfellow’s life. In the house he first got the notion to make writing his profession, rather than law or medicine or business. His father did not fully support his plan, given the unlikelihood that he could support himself as a writer.

Longfellow would prove his father’s doubts wrong, and by no small measure. He became the best known poet in the English-speaking world in his lifetime, writing works such as “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Song of Hiawatha” and “Evangeline.”

People of all walks of life appreciated Longfellow’s work. When he was in his sixties in 1868, Queen Victoria received him. The queen was surprised to see her servants clamoring for a glimpse of him.

Longfellow died in 1882 and lived most of his adult life in Cambridge, Mass. But his childhood home in Maine retained a place in his heart, and he visited regularly until the year before he died.

Anne Longfellow Pierce, Henry’s sister, preserved the family home in much the state it was in when Peleg Wadsworth had lived in it. In her will, she bequeathed the house, land and many furnishings to the Maine Historical Society upon her death in 1901. The society has operated it as a museum ever since. A visit takes you on a remarkable trip back in time to the early days of Maine and Longfellow’s life.

Rear of the Wadsworth-Longfellow house shown from the garden.

Five Things You’ll Never Forget if you Visit

The Pitcher in the Summer Dining Room

On one shelf in the summer dining room rests a blue-and-white pitcher made around 1800 in memory of George Washington. The pitcher was used to serve lemonade each year on the Fourth of July. It has sat on the shelf for well over 100 years.

The summer dining room

The Waiting Room

For about 10 years beginning in 1815, Stephen Longfellow operated his law office in the house’s front sitting room. A new side entrance and vestibule were built as a sitting room for clients. It was a place Henry often used to study and write. He was not happy when the family remodeled the room to make it a china closet after his father moved his law office out of the house.

Childhood Desk of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The second-story back bedroom contains a number of items from the Longfellow children’s day, including a pine child’s desk, worn and scribbled with graffiti, that dates to the school years of the Longfellow children.

Handprints in the Hall

In the rear hallway of the house, the plaster bears one of the most tangible reminders of the Wadsworth children. On the wall you can see the handprint in the plaster and the inscription “Eliza Wads-worth.” It belongs to Zilpah’s sister who died at the age of 22. Elizabeth Wadsworth not only was a favorite of Zilpah, who nursed her through her young life, but she was also thought to be betrothed to Stephen Longfellow. She died, however, before they married. It was after Elizabeth’s death that Zilpah and Stephen would marry.

Zilpah’s Wallpaper

Zilpah’s chamber on the second floor was a room that Henry’s mother spent many hours in. While much of the mansion is typical of what you might expect of an old New England home, Zilpah’s room reflects her colorful tastes, especially on the wall. The bright blue French wallpaper features a trellis and floral design that look very un-New England.

Visiting the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Childhood Home

The Wadsworth-Longfellow House is open for tours May through October. Information about the house is available at its website.


Summer dining room image courtesy of the Library of Congress.  

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Ten Takes on New England History by Maine Humorist Bill Nye

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Illustration from Bill Nye’s Comic History of the United States

Edgar Wilson Nye left Maine (he was born in the small town of Shirley) as a small child, but somehow the dry humor that Maine is so famous for stayed with him. Publishing under the name “Bill Nye,” not to be confused with the other Bill Nye. Nye grew up in Wisconsin and launched his career as a humorist there while still serving as a judge and lawyer.

He began publishing a comic newspaper, The Boomerang, which circulated throughout the country. At the urging of publishers, he moved east to Staten Island, publishing a series of highly successful books: “Bill Nye and the Boomerang,” 1881; “The Forty Liars,” 1883; “Bailed Hay,” 1884; “Bill Nye’s Blossom Rock,” 1885, and “Remarks,” 1886.

Illustration from Bill Nye’s Comic History of the United States

Illustration from Bill Nye’s Comic History of the United States

His last works were and Bill Nye’s Comic History of the United States, published in 1894 Bill Nye’s Comic History of England, published in 1896 (posthumously). By 1895, Nye’s work was appearing in numerous newspapers via syndication and he was an active and sought-after public speaker. His income reached well into the tens of thousands of dollars. Nye told friends he was growing weary of his reputation as one of America’s leading humorists because no one took anything he said seriously. He had a goal of transitioning away from comic to serious writing, but he never got the chance. He died at age 45.

other bill nyeBy his death in 1896 from meningitis, his health had suffered greatly; he had moved to North Carolina for the warmer climate. Some of Nye’s work would be considered politically incorrect by today’s audiences, but below are 10 excerpts from his Comic History of The United States:

  1. On the increasing number of colonists in the 1620s:

The Mayflower began to bring over quantities of antique furniture, mostly hall-clocks for future sales. Hanging them on spars and masts during rough weather easily accounts for the fact that none of them have ever been known to go.

  1. On the establishment of the Plymouth Colony:

In the fall of 1620 the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth during a disagreeable storm, and, noting the excellent opportunity for future misery, began to erect a number of rude cabins. This party consisted of one hundred and two people of a resolute character who wished to worship God in a more extemporaneous manner than had been the custom in the Church of England.

The Mayflower, laden with antiques, as imagined by Bill Nye.

The Mayflower, laden with antiques, as imagined by Bill Nye.

They found that the Indians of Cape Cod were not ritualistic, and that they were willing to dispose of inside lots at Plymouth on reasonable terms, retaining, however, the right to use the lands for massacre purposes from time to time.

  1. Early agricultural success of New Englanders:

Money-matters, however, were rather panicky at the time, and the people were kept busy digging clams to sustain life in order to raise Indian corn enough to give them sufficient strength to pull clams enough the following winter to get them through till the next corn crop should give them strength to dig for clams again. Thus a trip to London and the Isle of Wight looked farther and farther away.

  1. Puritan pastimes:

During dull times and on rainy days it was a question among the Puritans whether they would banish an old lady, bore holes with a red-hot iron through a Quaker’s tongue, or pitch horse-shoes.

  1. On the Opening of “witch hunting season.”

The year 1692 is noted mostly for the Salem excitement regarding witchcraft. The children of Rev. Mr. Parris were attacked with some peculiar disease which would not yield to the soothing blisters and bleedings administered by the physicians of the old school, and so, not knowing exactly what to do about it, the doctors concluded that they were bewitched. Then it was, of course, the duty of the courts and selectmen to hunt up the witches. This was naturally difficult.

Fifty-five persons were tortured and twenty were hanged for being witches;

“Be you a witch?” asked one of the judges of Massachusetts, according to the records now on file in the State-House at Boston.

“No, your honor,” was the reply.

“Officer,” said the court, taking a pinch of snuff, “take her out on the tennis-grounds and pull out her toe-nails with a pair of hot pincers, and then see what she says.”

It was quite common to examine lady witches in the regular court and then adjourn to the tennis-court. A great many were ducked by order of the court and hanged up by the thumbs, in obedience to the customs of these people who came to America because they were persecuted.

  1. On his home state of Maine’s early history…
A visitor seeking refreshment at Bar Harbor.

A visitor seeking refreshment at Bar Harbor.

Shortly after the landing of the Pilgrims, say two years or thereabouts, Gorges and Mason obtained from England the grant of a large tract lying between the Merrimac and Kennebec Rivers. This patent was afterwards dissolved, Mason taking what is now New Hampshire, and Gorges taking Maine. He afterwards sold the State to Massachusetts for six thousand dollars. The growth of the State may be noticed since that time, for one county cost more than that last November.

In 1820 Maine was separated from Massachusetts. Maine is noted for being the easternmost State in the Union, and has been utilized by a number of eminent men as a birthplace. White-birch spools for thread, Christmas-trees, and tamarack and spruce-gum are found in great abundance. It is the home of an industrious and peace-loving people. Bar Harbor is a cool place to go to in summer-time and violate the liquor law of the State.

  1. On the Puritans and their taxes…

Having banished Roger Williams and Mrs. Hutchinson to be skinned by the Pequods and Narragansetts over at Narragansett Pier, they went on about their business, flogging Quakers, also ducking old women who had lumbago, and burning other women who would not answer affirmatively when asked, “Be you a witch?”

Then when Roger began to make improvements and draw the attention of Eastern capital to Rhode Island and to organize a State or Colony with a charter, Plymouth said, “Hold on, Roger: religiously we have cast you out, to live on wild strawberries, clams, and Indians, but from a mercantile and political point of view you will please notice that we have a string which you will notice is attached to your wages and discoveries.

Afterwards, however, Roger Williams obtained the necessary funds from admiring friends with which to go to England and obtain a charter…

  1. On the New England Colonists’ contribution to the capture of Cape Breton…

King George’s War, which extended over four years, succeeded, but did not amount to anything except the capture of Cape Breton by English and Colonial troops. Cape Breton was called the Gibraltar of America; but a Yankee farmer who has raised flax on an upright farm for twenty years does not mind scaling a couple of Gibraltars before breakfast; so, without any West Point knowledge regarding engineering, they walked up the hill, and those who were alive when they got to the top took it. It was no Balaklava business and no dumb animal show, but simply revealed the fact that brave men fighting for their eight-dollar homes and a mass of children are disagreeable people to meet on the battle-field.

  1. On Dictionary publisher Noah Webster’s darkest secret…

I might add, though I dislike to speak of it now, that Mr. Webster was at one time a member of the Legislature of Massachusetts. I believe that was the only time he ever stepped aside from the strait and narrow way. A good many people do not know this, but it is true.

  1. On the Puritan influence in Boston…

Salem and Charlestown were started by Governor Endicott, and Boston was founded in 1630. To these various towns the Puritans flocked, and even now one may be seen in ghostly garments on Thanksgiving Eve flitting here and there turning off the gas in the parlor while the family are at tea, in order to cut down expenses.

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Captain Kidd’s Treasure and the Secrets of the Astor Fortune

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John Jacob Astor made a fortune. But did he do it as a fur trader, as he told everyone? Or, did he actually base his fortune on buried pirate treasure discovered in Deer Isle, Maine? And did he keep it secret so he didn’t have to return it to its rightful owners?

That’s what Franklin Head told the world.

Well, in actuality Astor built his fortune on fur trading. But the myth that he discovered buried treasure on the coast of Maine has persisted – ever since it was created by a Chicago lawyer and bon vivant who liked to entertain his rich friends with fanciful historical spoofs.

John Jacob Astor by John Wesley Jarvis

Franklin Harvey Head was the lawyer who invented the story. Born in New York, he went west to Wisconsin to practice law. His career took him to California and Utah, where he had mining and cattle interests. And finally he landed back in Chicago as a bank director and president of the Chicago Malleable Iron Company.

During his off hours, Head liked to socialize with Chicago’s literary society. To entertain his wealthy friends, he published humorous books based upon fanciful tales.

Shakespeare’s Insomnia

Franklin Head

Franklin Head (inset)

For example, Head noticed that William Shakespeare’s characters frequently express their wish for a restful sleep to ease their minds. He then published: Shakespeare’s Insomnia and the Causes Thereof. In the parody he included “newly-discovered” correspondence between the playwright and Sir Walter Raleigh, actor William Kempe and money lender “Mordecai Shylock.” The fictitious letters highlighted Shakespeare’s money and marital difficulties. Head argued they caused the insomnia that influenced his plays.

Head had wealthy friends who founded the exclusive Jekyll Island Club, a retreat off the Georgia coast. For their entertainment, Head published Studies in Early American History: The Legends of Jekyll Island. The fictitious history interweaves real and fake historical names and stories with the names and photographs of Head’s friends. Yet many took the book as truth, and incorporated into later histories of the island.

Jekyll Island clubhouse

A Head book dealing with Maine spawned the Astor story. Head was dining with the daughter of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted when the subject of his Maine property came up. Olmsted owned an estate on Maine’s Deer Isle and spent one summer there before his death.

The pirate William Kidd was a favorite of Head’s. He had also worked him into his Jekyll Island history. From his Olmsted conversation came Studies in Early American History: A Notable Lawsuit. The story described how Olmstead’s descendants had sued the Astor family to recover William Kidd’s pirate treasure.

 

Frederick Law Olmsted

The Astor Fortune

According to Head’s account, a trapper had discovered a buried treasure chest from William Kidd on land that Olmsted’s ancestors owned on Deer Isle. The trapper stole the chest and, not knowing its actual value, sold it to Astor. It then formed the basis for the Astor fortune.

Barred Island, part of the Deer Isle property owned by Frederick Law Olmsted

In Head’s account, generations later the Olmsteds discovered the theft and sued Astor for compensation. That includED back rent on all his Manhattan real estate, which he could not have purchased without the stolen treasure.

The book is full of tipoffs that it is not factual, including references to Olmsted ancestors Cotton Mather Olmsted and Oliver Cromwell Olmsted. Perhaps the most glaring indicator that the story was not true was the absence of any lawsuit that the book was supposedly based upon.

Nevertheless, the appetite for news of the wealthy was so strong the story came to be taken as truth. Liberty Magazine then published it as fact. People would tell and it would be told and reprinted many times over the years.

William Kidd

The Hoax Has Legs

Originally printed in 1892, the story then surfaced in 1926 when a California historian presented it as true. It then made its way into newspapers around the world. Not to be outdone, newspapers in the state of Maine even postulated that the state could recover the treasure. After all, selling stolen goods was illegal.

There’s no indication that Head, who died in 1914, intended his stories to be taken seriously — or even that they would be distributed beyond his circle of friends.

This story about the Astor fortune last updated in 2021. Images: Jekyll Island clubhouse by By Lawrence G. Miller (Lawrence G. Miller on en.wikipedia) – Photograph created by Miller using a Casio QV-2000UX digital camera., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8489632.

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Edwin Arlington Robinson – The Poet Who Created Maine’s Tilbury Town

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Why did Richard Cory shoot himself? Because Maine’s Edwin Arlington Robinson wanted it that way.

Robinson was born in Gardiner, Maine in 1869 and spent most of his first 30 years there. He formed impressions about how men and women pursued their lives and overcame adversity – or didn’t.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

His focus on these themes arose from his own family’s circumstances. Robinson’s father, a prosperous banker, lost much of his wealth in the recession of 1893. His eldest brother, a physician, ruined his health through addiction to laudanum. A second brother disappointed him by marrying the girl Edwin had his eye on.

The family downfall shaped Edwin’s world view as he delved deeper and deeper into the life of a poet. He  later earned the nickname “America’s poet laureate of unhappiness.” Yet the title doesn’t quite fit Robinson, more reserved than unhappy,

Robinson came by his name through chance. His mother expected a girl and didn’t pick out a name for him before his birth. Her illness following his birth distracted her from turning her attention to the task of naming him.

Summering in Harpswell, Maine, some visitors from away pressured her to name the six-month-old baby and so they drew names from a hat. Edwin was the first name and Arlington the second because the lady who drew the name came from Arlington, Mass.

Robinson’s second volume of poetry, Children of the Night, had modest success, but he struggled to publish subsequent volumes. Convinced he needed a change of scenery, Robinson moved to New York in 1899, His career, however, didn’t really take off until President Teddy Roosevelt discovered him.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (painting by Lilla Cabot Perry)

Children of the Night impressed Roosevelt’s son when he read it at school in Groton, Mass., and he gave a copy to his father. Roosevelt persuaded a publisher to reissue the volume and personally reviewed it. Roosevelt also found Robinson a spot on the public payroll at New York’s Customs House.

Tilbury Town

With that income to prop him up, Edwin published another book of poems, paid for by his old friends from Gardner who had faith in the town’s favorite son. Eventually, Edwin achieved that rarest of literary feats: He made a living from his poetry, much of which included allusions to the fictional Tilbury Town (in reality Gardiner).

In 1922 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems. He won it again in 1928 for his The Man Who Died Twice.

People often viewed Robinson as reclusive. His partial deafness and poor vision made him seem standoffish. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist, either. But he was neither isolated nor dour. He summered at New Hampshire’s MacDowell Colony, and chums from Gardiner recall him as a funny, mischievous young man. Though never married, Robinson had several romances. He had one with a young woman he tutored and another with artist Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones.

Though Robinson had a relatively optimistic world view and published a book a year the last few years of his life, history best remembers him for his struggles as a young poet and two of his short poems. Miniver Cheevy describes a man hopelessly trapped in his nostalgia for a past age. And Richard Cory, a short poem about a handsome, wealthy banker who abruptly shoots himself in the head without further explanation.

Richard Cory

Countless generations of schoolchildren and artists have analyzed the motivations and meaning of Richard Cory. And the poem has been dissected many times for the various poetic devices it employs. The story inspired plays, imitations, and songs – including Simon and Garfunkel’s Richard Cory.

Comedian Garrison Keillor proposed his own alternate version of the poem, concluding Cory’s suicide made sense if you’d known his difficult wife. As for the actual inspiration for Richard Cory, two theories are proposed.

Robinson’s biographer suggests he drew the character from Sedgewick Plummer, a Gardiner lawyer and banker who lost his fortune and home. His brother’s widow suggested he drew him from his brother. who lost most of his wealth and succumbed to alcoholism.

Robinson himself stayed silent on the matter – much to the consternation of young students of literature – and died in 1935 of cancer.

This story was updated in 2022. Portrait of Edwin Arlington Robinson courtesy Colby College Special Collections, Waterville, Maine. 

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