ROBINSON, EDWARD American Biblical scholar, was born in Southington, Conn., on April 1o, 1794. In 1837 he became professor of Biblical literature in Union Theologi cal seminary, and left America for three years of study in Pales tine and Germany, the fruit of which, his Biblical Researches (published simultaneously in England, Germany and America in 1841), brought him the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1842. Later Biblical Researches appeared in 1856. His plans to sum up his important topographical studies in a work on Biblical geography were cut short by cataract in 1861 and by his death in New York city on Jan. 27,1863. A great Biblical scholar and exegete, Robinson must be considered the pioneer and father of Biblical geography. His Biblical Researches, supplemented by the Physical Geography of the Holy Land (1865), were based on careful personal exploration and tempered by a thoroughly critical spirit, which was possibly at times too sceptical of local tradition. Of scarcely less value in their day were his Greek Har mony of the Gospels (1845) and his Greek and English Lexicon of the New Testament (1836).
See H. B. Smith and R. D. Hitchcock, The Life, Writings and Character of Edward Robinson (1863) ; a biography of Mrs. Robinson was published, with a collection of her stories, in Leipzig, in ROBINSON, EDWIN ARLINGTON g6 ( ,I9—I935), an American poet, was born at Head Tide (Maine), Dec. 22, 1869.
From the public schools of Gardiner (Maine), he proceeded in 1891 to Harvard, but withdrew after two years. Most of his later life was spent in New York city, where he was for a time a subway inspector and, through President Roosevelt's recognition of his merit, a clerical worker in the Customs House. He received several awards of the Pulitzer prize for poetry.
His verse includes The Torrent and the Night Before (1896), The Children of the Night (1897), Captain Craig (1902), The Town Down the River (i9lo), The Man Against the Sky (1916), Merlin (1917), Lancelot (192o), The Three Taverns (192o), Avon's Harvest (1921), Collected Poems (1921), Roman Bartholow (1923), The Man Who Died Twice (1924), Dionysus in Doubt (1925), Tristram (1927) and Cavender's House (1929). Experiments in a different medium are the prose plays Van Zorn (1914) and The Porcupine (1915). Mr. Robin son's work, of singularly uniform poetic excellence and of penetrating Insight, gives him a foremost place among contemporary writers.
See biographical and critical monographs by Lloyd Morris (with a bibliography by W. Van R. Whitall, 1923), by B. R. Redman (1926), and by Mark Van Doren (1927).