Talking about sleeping, he said: ‘Eight hours is all a man ought to lie stretched out.’” He was more articulate than I have ever seen him before his conversation bore out more the impression his book gives. “Robinson took a walk with me,” I note in my journal in February, 1899, “and then came to my room and ate eclairs. His laconic comments on persons and books had a repressed wit peculiar to him, giving the impression of a wisdom at once shrewd and magnanimous. In my journal I find the entry for May 31, 1898:Įdwin Arlington Robinson spent the afternoon with me, and a curious chap he is: you have to wait hours for him to say anything but he is interesting enough, nevertheless. In contrast with my other friends among the Harvard poets, especially with the romantic warmth of William Vaughn Moody and the delicate idealism of Philip Henry Savage, his personality seemed to me at first dry, almost prosaic. His eyes gleamed and glowed behind his spectacles, alternately quiet with poetic penetration and dancing with humorous irony. Robinson was tall and in a sensitive way handsome, with dark hair, flowing moustache, and fresh healthy color. We met for the first time in the spring of 1898, when he was working, I believe, in some magazine office in Cambridge, and I was assisting in the English courses of Barrett Wendell. He left college, indeed, at the end of his sophomore year. Though Edwin Arlington Robinson and I were both in the Class of 1895 at Harvard, I never knew him as an undergraduate.
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