An American poet who won twenty-two years ago a reputation with a small volume, who ten years later seemed almost forgotten, and who now deservedly stands higher than ever before is Edwin Arlington Robinson. He was born in Maine, on the twenty-second of December, 1869, and studied at Harvard University. In 1896 he published two poems, _The Torrent_ and _The Night Before;_ these were included the next year in a volume called _The Children of the Night._ His successive books of verse are _Captain Craig,_ 1902; _The Town Down the River,_ 1910; _The Man Against the Sky,_ 1916; _Merlin,_ 1917; and he has printed two plays, of which _Van Zorn_ (1914) despite its chilling reception, is exceedingly good. Mr. Robinson is not only one of our best known American contemporary poets, but is a leader and recognized as such. Many write verses today because the climate is so favourable to the Muse's somewhat delicate health. But if Mr. Robinson is not a germinal writer, he is at all events a precursor of the modern advance. The year 1896 was not opportune for a venture in verse, but the Gardiner poet has never cared to be in the rearward of a fashion. The two poems that he produced that year he has since surpassed, but they clearly demonstrated his right to live and to be heard. The prologue to the 1897 volume contained his platform, which, so far as I know, he has never seen cause to change. Despite the title, he is not an infant crying in the night; he is a full-grown man, whose voice of resonant hope and faith is heard in the darkness. His chief reason for believing in God is that it is more sensible to believe in Him than not to believe. His religion, like his art, is founded on common sense. Everything that he writes, whether in drama, in lyrics, or in prose criticism, is eminently rational. There is one creed, and only one, That glorifies God's excellence; So cherish, that His will be done, The common creed of common sense. It is the crimson, not the grey, That charms the twilight of all time; It is the promise of the day That makes the starry sky sublime. It is the faith within the fear That holds us to the life we curse;-- So let us in ourselves revere The Self which is the Universe! Let us, the Children of the Night, Put off the cloak that hides the scar! Let us be Children of the Light, And tell the ages what we are! This creed is repeated in the sonnet _Credo_, later in the same volume, which also contains those rather striking portraits of individuals, of which the most impressive is _Richard Cory_. More than one critic has observed that these dry sketches are in a way forerunners of the _Spoon River Anthology_.