An extract from here says... 

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) was a poet of transition. He lived at the time following the Civil War when America was rebuilding and changing rapidly and when the dominant values of the country seemed to be growing increasingly materialistic. Robinson's poetry was transitional, evaluating the present by using traditional forms and by including elements of transcendentalism and Puritanism. Robinson spent his childhood in a small town in Maine, a town which furnished him a setting for many of his poems as well as models for his characters. His father was a prosperous merchant; his mother had been a schoolteacher. The parents were primarily interested in their two older sons and tended to ignore Edwin, though they recognized his exceptional intelligence. While fond of his family, Edwin felt himself an outsider among them, as he also felt alienated from the society of his town. Suddenly, with the poetic revival that preceded World War I, Robinson began to play a major role as a poet. After going his own way quietly for so many years, he became widely read and exerted a strong influence on other poets, notably Frost. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry three times in the 1920's, a record exceeded only by Frost, who received the prize four times in all. The core of Robinson's philosophy is the belief that man's highest duty is to develop his best attributes as fully as possible. Success is measured by the intensity and integrity of his struggle; failure consists only in a lack of effort. Robinson was most interested in people who had either failed spiritually, or who seemed failures to the world but had really succeeded in gaining spiritual wisdom. Despite his apparent pessimism he refused to subscribe to a naturalistic view of life. Being by nature introspective and conscious of psychological depths, he was acutely aware of the spiritual side of man and relatively uninterested in the surface aspects of man's life as a social creature. 

A couple of his works that I enjoy...

The Mill
 
The miller's wife had waited long,
The tea was cold, the fire was dead;
And there might yet be nothing wrong
In how he went and what he said:
"There are no millers any more,"
Was all that she heard him say;
And he had lingered at the door
So long it seemed like yesterday.

Sick with a fear that had no form
She knew that she was there at last;
And in the mill there was a warm
And mealy fragrance of the past.
What else there was would only seem
To say again what he had meant;
And what was hanging from a beam
Would not have heeded where she went.

And if she thought it followed her,
She may have reasoned in the dark
That one way of the few there were
Would hide her and would leave no mark:
Black water, smooth above the weir
Like starry velvet in the night,
Though ruffled once, would soon appear
The same as ever to the sight.

and


The Valley of the Shadow
 
There were faces to remember in the Valley of the Shadow, 
There were faces unregarded, there were faces to forget; 
There were fires of grief and fear that are a few forgotten ashes, 
There were sparks of recognition that are not forgotten yet. 
For at first, with an amazed and overwhelming indignation
At a measureless malfeasance that obscurely willed it thus, 
They were lost and unacquainted—till they found themselves in others, 
Who had groped as they were groping where dim ways were perilous. 

There were lives that were as dark as are the fears and intuitions 
Of a child who knows himself and is alone with what he knows;
There were pensioners of dreams and there were debtors of illusions, 
All to fail before the triumph of a weed that only grows. 
There were thirsting heirs of golden sieves that held not wine or water, 
And had no names in traffic or more value there than toys: 
There were blighted sons of wonder in the Valley of the Shadow,
Where they suffered and still wondered why their wonder made no noise. 

There were slaves who dragged the shackles of a precedent unbroken, 
Demonstrating the fulfilment of unalterable schemes, 
Which had been, before the cradle, Time’s inexorable tenants 
Of what were now the dusty ruins of their father’s dreams.
There were these, and there were many who had stumbled up to manhood,
Where they saw too late the road they should have taken long ago: 
There were thwarted clerks and fiddlers in the Valley of the Shadow, 
The commemorative wreckage of what others did not know. 

And there were daughters older than the mothers who had borne them,
Being older in their wisdom, which is older than the earth; 
And they were going forward only farther into darkness, 
Unrelieved as were the blasting obligations of their birth; 
And among them, giving always what was not for their possession, 
There were maidens, very quiet, with no quiet in their eyes;
There were daughters of the silence in the Valley of the Shadow, 
Each an isolated item in the family sacrifice. 

There were creepers among catacombs where dull regrets were torches, 
Giving light enough to show them what was there upon the shelves— 
Where there was more for them to see than pleasure would remember
Of something that had been alive and once had been themselves. 
There were some who stirred the ruins with a solid imprecation, 
While as many fled repentance for the promise of despair: 
There were drinkers of wrong waters in the Valley of the Shadow, 
And all the sparkling ways were dust that once had led them there.

There were some who knew the steps of Age incredibly beside them, 
And his fingers upon shoulders that had never felt the wheel; 
And their last of empty trophies was a gilded cup of nothing, 
Which a contemplating vagabond would not have come to steal. 
Long and often had they figured for a larger valuation,
But the size of their addition was the balance of a doubt: 
There were gentlemen of leisure in the Valley of the Shadow, 
Not allured by retrospection, disenchanted, and played out. 

And among the dark endurances of unavowed reprisals 
There were silent eyes of envy that saw little but saw well;
And over beauty’s aftermath of hazardous ambitions 
There were tears for what had vanished as they vanished where they fell.
Not assured of what was theirs, and always hungry for the nameless, 
There were some whose only passion was for Time who made them cold:
There were numerous fair women in the Valley of the Shadow,
Dreaming rather less of heaven than of hell when they were old. 

Now and then, as if to scorn the common touch of common sorrow, 
There were some who gave a few the distant pity of a smile; 
And another cloaked a soul as with an ash of human embers, 
Having covered thus a treasure that would last him for a while.
There were many by the presence of the many disaffected, 
Whose exemption was included in the weight that others bore: 
There were seekers after darkness in the Valley of the Shadow, 
And they alone were there to find what they were looking for. 

So they were, and so they are; and as they came are coming others,
And among them are the fearless and the meek and the unborn; 
And a question that has held us heretofore without an answer 
May abide without an answer until all have ceased to mourn. 
For the children of the dark are more to name than are the wretched, 
Or the broken, or the weary, or the baffled, or the shamed:
There are builders of new mansions in the Valley of the Shadow, 
And among them are the dying and the blinded and the maimed.
 

More of his works can be found here

Take care.

alien