The Man Against the Sky

The collection in which Robinson's mature manner arrives. "Flammonde" gives a man who could put everyone's life right except his own; "Eros Turannos" a wife who chooses a husband she knows to be worthless and the town that watches her do it; "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford" is a long dramatic monologue in which Jonson, talking to a visitor, tries and fails to explain Shakespeare to himself. The title poem watches a figure walking over the crest of a hill into the sunset and turns into a long argument about what, if anything, waits at the end of a life.

Edwin Arlington Robinson published The Man Against the Sky in 1916, after nearly twenty years of obscurity and clerking. It was the book that established him, and the beginning of the recognition that brought him three Pulitzer Prizes.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the poems complete.