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Captain Craig
Captain Craig
Captain Craig
Audiobook3 hours

Captain Craig

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"In 1921, Edwin Arlington Robinson was only 52 and many of the pieces in his Collected Poems were written long before that. Yet he shows gifted understanding of old age, the passage of time, the slow decline that everyone must suffer, and the final cease and release of death. Isaac, in Isaac and Archibald, puts it very well to the poet's twelve-year-old alter ego:



""But even unto you, and your boy's faith,
Your freedom, and your untried confidence,
A time will come to find out what it means
To know that you are losing what was yours,
To know that you are being left behind;
And then the long contempt of innocence
God bless you, boy I don't think the worse of it
Because an old man chatters in the shade
Will all be like a story you have read
In childhood and remembered for the pictures.""

The title poem of the book, ""Captain Craig,"" is a series of monologues by a cranky, iconoclastic, perceptive and sometimes brilliant old eccentric, now in his final days, as he converses and entertains a set of younger men who befriend him. The old man is fascinating as he intertwines his themes of life and joy with his knowledge of his own approaching end.

The other poems in the book are short studies in love, life and death, often from surprising points of view. Throughout the book, his portraits of men and women come vividly to life; the insights into personality and character he found almost a century ago ring just as true today. His instinct for human nature, his understanding of the great issues that shape life and fate, and his ability to find deep meaning in the commonplace make his work as intriguing today as it was in his own day - a day in which he won no less than three Pulitzer Prizes.

Enjoy!
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LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 2, 2013
ISBN9781933311234
Captain Craig
Author

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.

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