Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to show that the validity and excellence of Edwin Arlington Robinson's poetry is due chiefly to three characteristics: First, the poet's apparent realization of the beauty of right moral conduct; second, his ability to use moral values as themes without becoming didactic; third, his achievement of a high degree of correspondence between matter and style. |Robinson is essentially a delineator of character. It is always the soul of a man with which he is concerned,—the spiritual conflicts which occur in everyone's life and prove his metal. In the victories of the soul, in its triumph over material failure, he finds beauty worthy of the poet. Moreover, much of his poetry reveals an artistic handling of the ethical element; that is, while the theme Is of an ethical nature, It is so skillfully Interwoven that the reader is conscious of it as of an added beauty, not as of a text for a sermon or a principle of life to be adopted.