`A Gentleman from Sole to Crown'

Like many of my contemporaries I first heard of Edwin Arlington Robinson by way of Simon and Garfunkel. A solemnly earnest arrangement of his 1897 poem “Richard Cory” appeared on Sounds of Silence, the duo's second album, released in January 1966. I was 13 and ripe for earnestness, so the melodrama of the final line impressed me. It also left me with the unearned conviction that Robinson was a hack, a sort of O. Henry in verse. I was wrong about Robinson and O. Henry, and I was wrong about “Richard Cory.” Paul Simon rewrote the poem, laying on the reductive irony with a putty knife. In his newly published Edward Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life, Scott Donaldson addresses Simon’s reworking:

“The character of Richard Cory is sketched impressionistically in the poem. Robinson furnishes no concrete information about his occupation or family. When Paul Simon rewrote the poem for his 1960s song, he decided to give Robinson’s shadowy character greater definition.

“`They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town,
With political connections to spread his wealth around.
Born into society, a banker’s only child,
He had everything a man could want: power, grace, and style.’

“In two following verses, Simon further delineates Cory as a contradictory figure: a celebrity whose picture appears everywhere and who is rumored to have `orgies on his yacht,’ a philanthropist who gives to charity and has `the common touch.’”

In a qualified defense of Simon, Donaldson adds:

“Wisely, though, Simon followed Robinson in not supplying Cory with reasons for his despondency. Speculative readers, missing the point of the poem, have rushed to explain why Cory shot himself….The central irony has to do with the wrongheaded attitude of the Tillbury townspeople, the `we’ of the poem, who commodify Cory into the embodiment of their own avaricious dreams.”

Here’s Robinson’s “Richard Cory”:

“Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

“And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But he still fluttered pulses when he said,
`Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.

“And he was rich -- yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

“So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.”

Robinson (1869-1935) was a modernist poet in spite of himself and the critics, a great one, and Donaldson performs a long-needed act of literary reclamation. I stayed up too late Wednesday reading his book, which begins beguilingly:

“This book derives from the conviction that Edward Arlington Robinson was a great American poet and an exceptionally fine human being. The story of his life deserves telling and has not been told.”

By the way, has any thesis-monger explored the E.A. Robinson/“Mrs. Robinson” nexus?