The Man Against the Sky

Written by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Narrated by Robert Bethune

"In The Man Against The Sky, Edwin Arlington Robinson presents us with a gallery of characters drawn from the streets, homes and gathering places of Tilbury Town, his fictional Northeastern dwelling place. A mysterious compelling stranger, a woman living on charity, a welcoming home - this and other portraits give us a compelling and perceptive view of the range of human character and feeling. As if to widen the horizons of Tilbury Town, he also imagines people from distant times and places. We hear Ben Jonson speculating about Shakespeare; we see Galahad at the moment of taking his seat at the Round Table, and Cassandra in her old age.

At the end of the book, he sums them all up in the brilliant and troubling poem that gives the title to the book, a portrait of a man seen against a fiery sky, a lonely man, unknown, yet representative of all humanity and of the human struggle to achieve - or, at the very least, continue the struggle.

""There can be no doubt of the high position he holds in American poetry when we examine 'The Man Against the Sky,' published in 1916. It would seem as though his previous books were merely working up to this achievement, so far beyond them is this volume. A little book of one hundred and forty-nine pages, and yet, in reading it, one experiences a sensation akin to that of the man who opens a jar of comopressed air. It is a profound wonder that so much can have been forced into so small a space. For 'The Man Against The Sky' is dynamic with experience and knowledge of life.""
-- Amy Lowell, in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, 1917, p. 51.

A Freshwater Seas production."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freshwater Seas
• Release date: Jun 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781933311272

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.