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    The Town Down the River
    The Town Down the River
    The Town Down the River
    Audiobook1 hour

    The Town Down the River

    Written by Edwin Arlington Robinson

    Narrated by Robert Bethune

    5/5

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    About this audiobook

    "In 1910, when Edwin Arlington Robinson published The Town Down The River, he included what has become one of his most famous poems: ""Miniver Cheevy."" His portrait of this man, a ""child of scorn"" who ""wept that he was ever born,"" who ""sighed for what was not,"" who ""scratched his head and kept on thinking,"" captures Arlington's sense of life in 32 immortal lines.

    The other poems in the book, though not as famous as ""Miniver Cheevy,"" amplify and explore Arlington's sense of the fate of humankind in ways both serious and comic. He can be mystically, really Biblically, allegorical, as in ""The Wise Brothers;"" he can be amused, cynical and detached, as in ""Doctor of Billiards."" He can be both relieved and amazed to find a human life that has redeemed itself, as in ""Shadrach O'Leary,"" and both frightened and bewildered by the inscrutable lives that confront him, as in ""Alma Mater.""

    No matter what mood he takes, his instinct for human nature, his understanding of the great issues that shape life and fate, and his ability to find deep meaning in the commonplace make his work as intriguing today as it was in his own day - a day in which he won no less than three Pulitzer Prizes.
    "
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFreshwater Seas
    Release dateMay 13, 2013
    ISBN9781933311258
    The Town Down the River
    Author

    Edwin Arlington Robinson

    The American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in 1869 in the Maine village of Head Tide and spent his school days in nearby Gardiner. Robinson developed a love of poetry in his youth, a love that endured until his death in New York in 1935. Robinson attended Harvard during 1891-1893 and published some of his early poetry in The Harvard Advocate. Although committed to becoming a writer, his path would not be an easy one. Income from Robinson's chosen pursuit was insufficient to maintain his modest lifestyle, much less meet his various responsibilities, and he worked at times as a secretary, a time-keeper, and a customs clerk, all the while continuing to write. After years of relative obscurity, he secured some incremental recognition with the publication of his poetry collections The Children of the Night, The Town Down the River, and The Man Against the Sky. During the First World War and in the decade that followed, Robinson composed a cycle of epic narrative poems, written in blank verse, that were modern in style but drew upon classic themes in substance. Against the unfolding tragedy of a world at war, Robinson composed a trilogy based on the legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. The trilogy included Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), and Tristram (1927). During the same period, Edwin Arlington Robinson would win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry twice; first for his Collected Poems (published in 1921), and again for The Man Who Died Twice (published in 1924). With Tristram, he would at last reap hard-won financial rewards for his literary labors. Edwin Arlington Robinson's Arthurian cycle reflects the poet's most mature work.

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