Edwin Arlington Robinson House

This modest house in Gardiner, Maine, is where Edwin Arlington Robinson grew up in the late eighteen hundreds, and it shaped everything he wrote. Robinson became one of the most decorated American poets of the early twentieth century, winning three Pulitzer Prizes, in nineteen twenty-two, nineteen twenty-five, and nineteen twenty-eight. His poems were populated by small-town failures, dreamers, and strivers drawn directly from what he saw in Gardiner, which he fictionalized as Tilbury Town.

Richard Cory, the wealthy man who goes home and puts a bullet through his head; Miniver Cheevy, who dreamed of the days of old, these characters captured an American loneliness that seemed utterly new. Robinson remains the poet of the Maine interior: close-lipped, unsparing, and quietly devastating.