And though he would try to disassociate his poetry from his birthplace, saying that his work bore only shadowy similarities to real people and places there, his portrait of Tilbury Town remains seared into the American consciousness as the iconic, stifling, provincial small town, its inhabitants a collection of disappointed individuals battling hypocrisy, doubt, and New England conventionality.įor despite the poet’s denials, virtually all of his poetic opus is born of and inextricably linked to the citizens and locales of this central Maine river town. himself, reluctantly acknowledged his Tilbury Town as one of those indelible places in the heart.Įdwin Arlington Robinson’s depictions of the people and places in Gardiner are forever tinged with the melancholy and despair of an artist who feels out of joint with his time and place. And yet, in stark contrast to the despair of these lines, Robinson went on to become a major, if mysterious force in American poetry, and “Tilbury Town,” the pseudonym he gave Gardiner, would come to embrace and honor the memory of their native son, just as for E.A.R. Flood, they might well have been Edwin Arlington Robinson’s very own thoughts as he turned his back on his birthplace and left Gardiner, Maine, forever. Though these were the words of his poetic creation, the intoxicated Mr. There was not much ahead of him,/ And there was nothing in the town below, First Published in Scene 4 Magazine, February 1, 2016
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