The Man Who Died Twice
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Summary
The Man Who Died Twice is a single long narrative poem centered on Fernando Nash, a once promising composer whose early gift for music never found the discipline or the luck it needed and who ends up, by the time the poem finds him, reduced to drumming on the street for spare change. Edwin Arlington Robinson tells the story in austere blank verse that stays close to Nash's own reckoning with what he threw away, more interested in the workings of a guilty, self aware conscience than in dramatizing the specific incidents of a wasted career, so the poem reads less like a plotted tragedy than like an extended internal confession.
The title's paradox, a man who died twice, points to Robinson's real subject: a first, spiritual death in the collapse of Nash's ambition and self respect, followed by a second reckoning that at least raises the possibility of some belated grace or clarity before the end. Robinson does not resolve that question neatly, staying instead with the difficulty of a man trying to account honestly for his own failure without either excusing it or being crushed entirely by it. The poem's music, appropriately for a story about a composer, comes through in Robinson's careful control of rhythm and pause rather than through any description of Nash's own compositions, which the poem leaves largely unheard.
This continues the study of failure and squandered talent that runs through nearly all of Robinson's Tilbury Town poems, applied here at greater length and with a single sustained focus rather than spread across a gallery of separate short portraits. It suits a reader who found Robinson's shorter character studies compelling and wants to see the same unsparing, compassionate psychological attention extended across one full length narrative.
Historical Context & Significance
Edwin Arlington Robinson won his second Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1925 for The Man Who Died Twice, three years after his first, for Collected Poems in 1922, and three years before his third, for Tristram in 1928, giving him a run of three prizes in seven years that made him the most decorated poet of the prize's first decade.
Robinson had by this point long since moved past the poverty of his earliest career, when he self published his first books and lived close to want until President Theodore Roosevelt secured him a government sinecure in 1905. By the mid 1920s he was instead the most Pulitzer recognized poet in the country, and The Man Who Died Twice extended the same unsparing interest in failure and conscience that had defined his work since Tilbury Town first appeared in his earlier collections.