'Particular Persons and Situations'

Edwin Arlington Robinson is likely to remain a one-poem poet for most readers, assuming he is read at all. Of course, one poem is more than most poets are remembered for. Simon and Garfunkel didn’t help when they recast “Richard Cory” as a strident diatribe about envy and class bitterness: “With political connections to spread his wealth around.” That line and most of the rest of the song don’t appear in Robinson’s poem.  I’m unable to find any evidence of political sentiments in Robinson’s work.

The writer whose work comes to mind when I read “Richard Cory” is Robinson’s contemporary, O. Henry. The poet was deeper and more sophisticated but started out writing fiction before turning to poetry. He even came up with a potential title for his stories, if they were ever published: Scattered Lives. Like a fiction writer, Robinson focuses in his poetry on characters. He was fond of narrative. The final line in “Richard Cory” clicks like a trick ending in one of O. Henry’s weaker stories. I like poems that tell a story, and some of Robinson’s are in a league with Kipling’s short stories. If Robinson writes in the first person, it’s in the voice of a character. No revelations of the poet’s sensitivity. In an 1894 letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith, Robinson writes:

 

“There is more in every person’s soul than we think. Even the happy mortals we term ordinary or commonplace act their own mental tragedies and live a far deeper and wider life than we are inclined to believe in the light of our prejudices.”

 

In his biography of Robinson, Scott Donaldson tells us “Richard Cory” was probably inspired, at least in part, by a suicide in the poet’s hometown of Gardiner, Maine. He quotes an April 24, 1897 letter to Smith: “Frank Anne blew his bowels out with a shot-gun. That was hell.” And in a letter that year to his friend Edith Brower he wrote: “I’ve written a nice little thing called ‘Richard Cory.’ . . . There isn’t any idealism in it, but there’s lots of something else—humanity, maybe. I opine that it will go.” And it has. Donaldson writes: “Its popularity became a source of annoyance to Robinson while he lived and has probably done his reputation harm.”

 

It was the first Robinson poem I encountered and the only one read as a classroom assignment. In his 1948 monograph on Robinson, Yvor Winters describes the poem as “a superficially neat portrait of the elegant man of mystery” that “builds up to a very cheap surprise ending.” As to Robinson’s larger accomplishment, Winters writes:

 

“[Nearly] all of Robinson’s best poems appear to deal with particular persons and situations; in these poems his examination is careful and intelligent, his method is analytic, and his style is mainly very distinguished. . . . he became on certain occasions one of the most remarkable poets in our language.”