Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem, presented this month by Bibliophiles. I'm Heidi White,

and today is Monday, January 31st. Sam, going to read for you a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

He was an American poet born in 1869, and he lived until 1935. He was a really interesting person. He was known in his youth as a recluse. He was depressed, very often alone. He was a very solitary person and poverty stricken until his poetry began to gain traction. And then that alleviated his poverty, but not his solitude. He had very

few friends. And his poetry has this very haunted quality to it. He was a modern poet, a capital M,

modern. And we'll talk about that again in a second with some of his themes. But I do want to

point out that he did indeed become a premier American poet. He won three Pulitzer Prizes.

He was known as a master of the sonnet in the United States. And he had a profound impact on

later poets, you know, like Robert Frost and James Wright.

But he maintained his solitude throughout his entire life.

And one thing you'll hear today in the poem I'm going to read for you today that is characteristic of Robinson and modern poetry in general is an exploration of a life unmoored from meaning,

meaninglessness, purposelessness. And you'll also hear in this poem, which I'm only going to

read once. It's a bit long, and so I'm going to offer my remarks now, and hopefully you'll catch it while you listen.

So one of the explorations of Robinson's poetry is the return of the soldier from war.

He wrote a lot of his poems about combat veterans from World War I.

If you know anything about that time period, there was a very deep existential, national, and international humanitarian wounds that came

from that war. And a lot of Robinson's poetry, today's poem in particular, explore that.

The loss of meaning, the sense of purposelessness, a turning towards addictive behavior,

which you'll hear with references to the jug in today's poem.

And just a very profound loneliness that came out of what we now know is

PTSD, which was just beginning to gain some kind of public understanding after World War I.

And many modern poets and novelists and authors explored the results of World War I on the

soul and on the country and on the international scene in their works of poetry and fiction.

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