richard cory poem essay

Cummings Guides Home.|.Contact This Site.  . Compiled by Michael J. Cummings.© 2003 Revised in 2011.©. Type of Work. Richard Cory is a short dramatic poem about a man whose outward appearance belies his inner turmoil. The tragedy in the poem reflects in its spirit the tragedies in Edwin Arlington Robinson's own life: Both of his brothers died young, his family suffered financial failures, and Robinson himself endured hardship before his poetry gained recognition—thanks in part to praise from an influential reader of them, Theodore Roosevelt. .Robinson published the poem himself in 1897 as part of a poetry collection called Children of the Night. The poem is a favorite of students and teachers because of the questions it poses about the the title character.  Setting.Although the poem mentions no specific locale, readers of Robinson’s poetry know that Richard Cory lives in fictional Tilbury Town, a community modeled on Robinson’s hometown of Gardiner, Maine. Gardiner is on the Kennebec River in southwestern Maine a few miles south of the state capital, Augusta. Robinson used Tilbury Town as the setting of many of his poems, including the highly popular Miniver Cheevy, although his poems seldom mention the town by name.  Text of the Poem Whenever Richard Cory went downtown, We people on the pavement1 looked at him;  He was a gentleman from sole to crown,2Clean favored, and imperially slim..4 And he was always quietly arrayed,3And he was always human4 when he talked;  But still he fluttered pulses when he said, “Good-morning, and he glittered5 when he walked.8 And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—  And admirably schooled in every grace; In fine,6 we thought that he was everything  To make us wish that we were in his place.12 So on we worked, and waited for the light,  And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one.
On Richard Cory Lloyd Morris The dramatist sets in operation a chain of circumstances in which his characters are unconsciously brought to book by their own past. The method of the naturalistic novelist is quite different; absolved of the necessity of a demonstration, he tends to be less and less concerned with incident and to become preoccupied with the effect of experience on character; the drama is purely internal and is revealed by minute and acute psychological analysis. When this method is applied to dramatic material the very absence of the terms in the demonstration essential to the dramatist produces the effect of irony. Consider, for example, Richard Cory: [.. ] Here we have a man's life-story distilled into sixteen lines. A dramatist would have been under the necessity of justifying the suicide by some train of events in which Richard Cory's character would have inevitably betrayed him. A novelist would have dissected the psychological effects of these events upon Richard Cory. The poet, with a more profound grasp of life than either, shows us only what life itself would show us; we know Richard Cory only through the effect of his personality upon those who were familiar with him, and we take both the character and the motive for granted as equally inevitable. Therein lies the ironic touch, which is intensified by the simplicity of the poetic form in which this tragedy is given expression. from The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson: An Essay in Appreciation. First published in 1923. Reissued in 1969 by Kennikat Press (Port Washington, N.Y.) Ellsworth Barnard Form in poetry, however, as has been said, involves not only adherence to a central story or theme, but some kind of progress or development toward a final effect to which each particular part has made its particular contribution. A simple and famous illustration is Richard Cory.. We need not.
“Richard Cory,” which first appeared in The Children of the Night and remains one of Robinson’s most popular poems, recalls the economic depression of 1893. At that time, people could not afford meat and had a diet mainly of bread, often day-old bread selling for less than freshly baked goods. This hard-times experience made the townspeople even more aware of Richard’s difference from them, so much so that they treated him as royalty. Although the people were surprised that Richard came to town dressed “quietly” and that he was “always human when he talked” (that is, he did not act superior), they nonetheless distanced themselves from him. This distance is suggested by the narrator’s words “crown,” “imperially,” “grace,” “fluttered pulses,” and “glittered.” The townspeople never stopped to consider why Richard dressed and spoke the way he did, why he came to town when everyone else was there, or even why he tried to make contact with them by saying “good morning.” Richard was wealthy, but (as his name hints) he was not rich at the life-core of himself. Despite his efforts at communal connection, Richard’s wealth isolated him from others. He was alone. If the townspeople wished they were in his place because of his wealth, he in turn wished he were one of them because they were rich in one another’s company. The townspeople failed to appreciate the value of their mutual support of one another, their nurturing communal togetherness. So one hot, breezeless summer night (before the availability of electric fans or air conditioners), Richard lay awake, unable to sleep or to stop painful thoughts. Depressingly lonely, he ended his friendless life. The poem’s reader is supposed to understand what the townspeople did not understand about Richard’s suicide: that there was a price, in a human rather than in a monetary sense, that he paid for being perceived to be “richer than.