The Full Spoon River Anthology

Spoon River Anthology Text

Criticism for Edgar Lee Masters and Spoon River Anthology

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Ernest Earnest
on the Popularity of Spoon River Anthology

Of course what made Spoon River Anthology immediately popular was the shock of recognition. Here for the first time in America was the whole of a society which people recognized - not only that part of it reflected in writers of the genteel tradition. Like Chaucer's pilgrims, the 244 characters who speak their epitaphs represent almost every walk of life--from Daisy Frazer, the town prostitute, to Hortense Robbins, who had travelled everywhere, rented a house in Paris and entertained nobility; or from Chase Henry, the town drunkard, to Perry Zoll, the prominent scientist, or William R Herndon, the law partner of Abraham Lincoln. The variety is far too great for even a partial list. There are scoundrels, lechers, idealists, scientists, politicians, village doctors, atheists and believers, frustrated women and fulfilled women.  The individual epitaphs take on added meaning because of often complex interrelationships among the characters. Spoon River is a community, a microcosm, not a collection of individuals.

from Ernest Earnest, "Spoon River Revisited." Western Humanities Review 21 (1967): 59-65. p. 63

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Charles E. Burgess on The Midwestern Village
in Spoon River Anthology

The midwestern village of several thousand persons in the late nineteenth century, cannot be compared intellectually to the moribund rural hamlets of today, culturally anesthetized by television, theReader's Digest, and the outpourings of book clubs. True, the villages of Masters' time did know conformity, isolation, poverty, and ignorance--and how effectively he portrayed these shortcomings!--but a surprising number of villagers lived active, cosmopolitan lives of travel and of the mind. If they lacked continuous urban diversions and broadening, they escaped the city's inconveniences and petty distractions. In the quiet village milieu there was a comforting sense of civilized ease that came with the transition from a rough pioneer society to a stable community buttressed by traditions. Many minds there found excitement in following and contributing to the courses of science and philosophy or in joining the effort toward mature American literature and criticism.

from Charles E. Burgess. "Master and Some Mentors" (175-201).

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John Hallwas on The Mythology of Spoon River

Masters recast his personal experience as public experience through the focusing and intensifying power of myth. His Midwest was a New World Eden that had degenerated under the influence of a corrupt, materialistic group that, since the time of Alexander Hamilton (Jefferson's political enemy), had not worked for the democratic ideal. He later depicted that historical process in The New World, but he expressed that mythic view for the first time in Spoon River Anthology. Masters created the series of epitaph-poems to clarify the American cultural dialectic that he had internalized, just as Faulkner created a myth of the South for the same purpose. In the process, Masters brought the unpoetic lives of everyday Americans into poetry for the first time and used his characterizations to symbolize his mythic vision - without realizing, of course, that it was mythic. Spoon River Anthology is, then, not only a kind of fragmented "Song of Myself," it is a more pessimistic version of Whitman's Democratic Vistas, focused on the triumph of the forces of disorder and decline in turn-of-the-century America. But within that account of a discordant, aimless, corrupted--and, hence, degenerated--society, the poet-hero struggles to secure the Jeffersonian vision and to place it in poetic "urns of memory," as Webster Ford says, where it may yet inspire cultural restoration. Once Masters's purpose and perspective are recognized, everything in the Anthology is absorbed into his powerful mythic image, and the book has remarkable wholeness and significance.

Indeed, Spoon River Anthology is culturally important because it reveals the inherent contradictions in the myth of America and the potentials for good and evil that such a cultural myth contains.  First of all, the Adamic American is an isolated, self-dependent figure who has no place in the Garden of the World, the social utopia that America is devoted to establishing. Hence the triumphant Elijah Browning, who creates himself in his own image as prophet-poet, achieves that identity by escaping from society. His New World Eden is the mountaintop, where he stands alone before the universe, responds to "the symphony of freedom" and achieves transcendence. As he says, "I could not return to the slopes-- / Nay, I wished not to return." But the slopes, which represent his discarded past, are also where everyone else is--and where people like Jeremy Carlisle hope "to walk together / And sing in chorus and chant the dawn / Of life that is wholly life." In other words, the myth of America reflects an ambivalent national spirit, with contradictory thrusts toward individualism and community.

from John Hallwas, "Introduction" to Spoon River Anthology (pp. 64-65).

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Charles E. Burgess on the Particular, the Current,
and the Local in Spoon River Anthology

It has been known since the publication in 1915 of Spoon River Anthology that Edgar Lee Masters drew much of its substance from the names, personalities, activities, and events of the central Illinois region where he grew to manhood. Both contemporary and current residents of the area have recognized that the book, in many senses, draws on community history. Scholars have agreed that matter was vital source material of the landmark in modern American poetry. Less well realized has been the role of communities of Masters's youth in the artistic and psychological stimulating of his expression. Such stimuli did exist, strong enough to impel him to use the region, a quarter of a century after he had left it, as the base of his most memorable work. That interval gave him the widened experience and the intellectual perspective necessary to impart to Spoon River Anthology senses of universality of subject, place, and time. Yet the broadening into a recognizable picture of many societies of many times did not diminish the functional importance of the book's particulars. In the use of the specific sources lies Spoon River Anthology's verisimilitude. The particulars were so strongly etched in Masters's mind and were brought forth with such sincere exactness in his writing that they were quite recognizable to people acquainted with the same communities--although seen from other lights, usually, by these persons.
In a larger sense, Masters--by 1915 an attorney of substantial reputation--was dealing in justice in creating Spoon River Anthology. He wanted to see that due praise was given to the sturdier spirits who had wrested the region from the wilderness of physical nature or who had, in later times, stood as bulwarks against the consequences of corrupt or weak human nature.

from Charles E. Burgess, "Masters and Some Mentors" p. 105.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/masters/spoon.htm

Edgar Lee Masters Comments on his Enduring Work, Spoon River Anthology

On How He Wrote Spoon River

From May 29, 1914, until about January 5, 1915, I poured the epitaphs into the Mirror, having written to Reedy that if this was what he liked I could give him all that he could print. By mid-Summer. the pieces were being quoted and parodied all over America, and they had penetrated to England. At this time I was carrying a difficult case through the Supreme Court of Illinois, and was acting for the Waitresses' Union in an injunction which kept me in court almost daily. But I was coming in contact with human nature in this counselship, and with stories of human suffering which kept my emotions at high tide, and the lenses of my inner eye magnified and polished.

All these stresses made it necessary for me to write the Anthology at odd times, such as Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Subjects, characters, dramas came into my mind faster than I could write them. Hence I was accustomed to jot down the ideas, or even the poems on backs of envelopes, margins of newspapers, when I was on the street car, or in court, or at luncheon, or at night after I had gone to bed. These notes were then amplified, and copied at large on big sheets of paper, which on Monday morning, as a rule, I took to my office, where my secretary, Jacob Prassel, an intelligent German youth, awaited me with smiles to see what I had done; and then, taking the sheets, he would turn to his typewriter and make a manuscript of faultless workmanship.

from "The Genesis of Spoon River Anthology" (p. 49)

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On Spoon River's "Free Verse"

There was nothing new about free verse except in the minds of illiterate academicians and quiet formalists like William Dean Howells, who called Spoon River "shredded prose." Reedy understood all these things as well as I. He knew that Imagism was not a new thing, though he kept urging me to make the Anthology more imagistic, and I refused, except where imagism as vivid description in the Shakespearean practice was called for. I had had too much study in verse, too much practice too, to be interested in such worthless experiments as polyphonic prose, an innovation as absurd as Dadaism or Cubism or Futurism or Unanimism, all grotesqueries of the hour, and all worthless, since they were without thought, sincerity, substance.

from "The Genesis of Spoon River" (p. 48)

"so you want to be a writer?" - A reflection on writing/other aspirations

so you want to be a writer?

  by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.


if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Exploring the East Village through Poetry

East Village Poetry Walk

Poetic Presidents: The Poetry Foundation matches presidents with the poets that inspired them

Poetic Presidents

We’ve matched 12 commanders-in-chief with the poets that inspired them.

BY ELIZABETH HARBALL

The following article was first published on October 31, 2012.
Politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose, former New York governor Mario Cuomo once said. While it’s debatable whether this epically long and tumultuous election cycle has inspired much verse, we at the Poetry Foundation would like to think that poetry has its place at the White House regardless of who emerges as the victor on November 6.
We’ve taken a look at American presidents throughout history and compiled a list of 12 commanders-in-chief and their favorite poets. Given the makeup of U.S. presidents thus far, the heavily male lineup doesn’t shock. Neither does the fact that presidents tend to be intimidated by poets (or secretly want to be poets) or that poets can be petty enough to make snide remarks about a president’s housekeeping. But we’re still holding out for a surprise: perhaps if the Republican candidate prevails, he’ll reveal his love for the Belle of Amherst or another poet from the state he used to govern.

George Washington and Phillis Wheatley
An educated African slave, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American woman to publish a collection of poetry, with the book appearing in 1773. Three years later, she sent a poem she wrote to George Washington that celebrated the general’s leadership. Washington wrote back to praise her “great poetical Talents” and told Wheatley that should she ever visit Cambridge, Massachusetts, he would “be happy to see a person so favoured by the Muses.”

Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Moore
During a visit to America in 1804, Irish poet Thomas Moore met with the British Minister and his wife, who were not happy with the president, in Washington. They complained, Moore later told his mother, that Jefferson treated the couple with “pointed incivility” and “petty hostility.” Later, the British Minister introduced Moore to the president, but Moore, perhaps still influenced by his friends, remained unimpressed; he wrote that the “president’s house” was in a “state of uncleanly desolation.” Years later, when Jefferson read Moore’s poetry, he exclaimed, “Why, this is the little man who satirized me so! Why, he is a poet after all!” Moore became one of Jefferson’s favorite poets.

John Quincy Adams and Christoph Martin Wieland
“Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I would have made myself a great poet,” John Quincy Adams wrote in 1816. But even he recognized that his poetry was “spell bound in the circle of mediocrity.” He had a little more success in the field of translation. During an 1800 trip to Germany, Adams was so taken with Christoph Martin Wieland’s epic poem Oberon that he decided he had to translate it. When he finished, Adams discovered another translation he felt was better than his own, so he set his work aside. It remained unpublished until 1940.

Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns
Like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln adored poetry. Lincoln was especially fond of Scottish poet Robert Burns, and committed many of his poems to memory. In 1865 Lincoln was invited to give a toast at a banquet honoring the poet, but he declined, writing: “I cannot frame a toast to Burns. I can say nothing worthy of his generous heart and transcending genius. Thinking of what he has said, I can not say anything which seems worth saying.”

Theodore Roosevelt and Edwin Arlington Robinson
Roosevelt so liked Edwin Arlington Robinson’s work that he invited him to dine at the White House in 1905, and later helped to provide the destitute poet with a job at the New York Customs House. In a letter to his son Kermit, Roosevelt wrote: “I am much struck by Robinson's two poems which you sent Mother. What a queer, mystical creature he is! … He certainly has got the real spirit of poetry in him.”

Photo of Anthony Euwer courtesy of Redpath Chautauqua Bureau Collection, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

Woodrow Wilson and Anthony Euwer
Woodrow Wilson was famously fond of reading and writing limericks. When the future president was speaking to a large crowd in Jersey City in 1908, a man heckled him and shouted, “You ain’t no beaut.” Wilson responded with this limerick byAnthony Euwer:

For beauty I am not a star;
There are others handsomer, far;
But my face, I don't mind it,
For I am behind it;
‘Tis the people in front that I jar.

The incident received so much press that the limerick is often misattributed to Wilson.

Harry S. Truman and Alfred, Lord Tennyson
From the time he graduated from high school in 1901, Harry S. Truman carried a fragment of Lord Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall” in his wallet. “The paper I copied it on kept wearing out, and I kept recopying it. I don’t know how many times, twenty or thirty, I expect,” Truman reportedly told the journalist Merle Miller, adding that he “had a lot more faith in poets than reporters.”

John F. Kennedy and Robert Frost
Robert Frost was the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration. Soon after John F. Kennedy uttered the famous words "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country," Frost took the podium, intending to read “Dedication,” a poem he had written especially for the occasion. But the bright sun reflecting off the January snow made it impossible for the 86-year-old poet to read his own writing, so he recited “The Gift Outright,” from memory, instead.

Gerald Ford and Rudyard Kipling
Gerald Ford was prone to fits of anger as a young man. After a particularly bad tantrum, his mother, Dorothy Ford, made him memorize Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If—.” “It will help you control that temper of yours,” she said. The poem begins: “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …” Like Kipling, Ford was a devoted member of the Freemasons.

Jimmy Carter and Dylan Thomas
Jimmy Carter is a great advocate of Dylan Thomas’s poetry. Upon discovering that there was no memorial to Thomas in Westminster Abbey’s “Poet’s Corner,” Carter launched a successful campaign to install a plaque there for the poet. Carter later opened the Dylan Thomas Centre, a museum dedicated to the poet, in Swansea, Wales.

Bill Clinton and Seamus Heaney
The title of Bill Clinton’s memoir, Between Hope and History, is taken from Seamus Heaney’s play The Cure at Troy, which the president read while visiting Ireland in 1995. He used an excerpt in a speech delivered in Derry, and Heaney later presented him with a handwritten copy. Clinton has called the poet “a gift to the people of Ireland and to the world and a gift to me in difficult times.” He has also joked that his Labrador retriever, Seamus, is named after Heaney.

Barack Obama and Elizabeth Alexander
The chair of African American studies at Yale, Elizabeth Alexander is a friend of Barack Obama’s—they were on the faculty together at the University of Chicago in the 1990s—and at his 2009 inauguration she read "Praise Song for the Day," which she had written for the occasion. Decades earlier, Alexander attended another auspicious occasion at the Washington Mall, albeit in a stroller; she was a year old when her parents brought her to hear Martin Luther King Jr. give his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. “To think that here, in that same space in Washington, D.C., we’re going to be at a quite different moment,” Alexander said in a PBS interview before the inauguration, “is a beautiful circle.”

"Richard Cory" Simon and Garfunkel

Robinson's poem finds its way into 1960s pop culture!

Criticism - "Richard Cory"

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.)

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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 crush this little piece under a massive analysis; a few more or less obvious comments will suffice to show how carefully the poem is put together. The first two lines suggest Richard Cory's distinction, his separation from ordinary folk. The second two tell what it is in his natural appearance that sets him off. The next two mention the habitual demeanor that elevates him still more in men's regard: his apparent lack of vanity, his rejection of the eminence that his fellows would accord him. At the beginning of the third stanza, "rich" might seem to be an anticlimax—but not in the eyes of ordinary Americans; though, as the second line indicates, they would not like to have it thought that in their eyes wealth is everything. The last two lines of the stanza record a total impression of a life that perfectly realizes the dream that most men have of an ideal existence; while the first two lines of the last stanza bring us back with bitter emphasis to the poem's beginning, and the impassable gulf, for most people—but not, they think, for Richard Cory—between dream and fact. Thus the first fourteen lines are a painstaking preparation for the last two, with their stunning overturn of the popular belief.
To repeat this sort of analysis for each of Robinson's poems would be as profitless as tedious to most readers, who will want to do it themselves if they want it done at all. We may, however, dwell a little on some of the patterns that the poet likes to follow. And first of all, it is to be observed that the structure of Richard Cory—the steady build-up to the surprise ending in the last line, is not characteristic. This fact fits in with what was said in the preceding chapter about Robinson's handling of the sonnet, and the quiet, unhurried close that he most often gives it; as well as with what has been all along implied concerning his distaste for every sort of sensationalism. But sometimes, as in Richard Cory, a different turn of mind reveals itself, perhaps sprung from the perception that lifedoes have surprises, that sometimes only at the very last do we find the key piece that makes the hitherto puzzling picture all at once intelligible.

from Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Critical Study. Copyright © 1952 by the MacMillan Company.

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W. R. Robinson

"Richard Cory" is perhaps the best-known example of his respect for the inaccessible recesses of man’s inner being . . .
The first reference to Tilbury Town occurs in "John Evereldown," which appeared in The Torrent and the Night Before (1896), Robinson’s first volume of poetry. Here, simply a place, it has not yet acquired a dramatic role. In other poems of the same volume, however, the small-town community, though unnamed, does begin to assume such a role, as for instance in "Richard Cory," where the collective "we" speaks as a character.

From Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poetry of the Act. © 1967 by The Press of Western Reserve University.

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Hoyt C. Franchere

In the Edwin-Emma-Hennan relationship, however, rivalry apparently developed into jealousy. The depth of the poet's involvement is revealed in "Cortege," as has been said. To what extent that rivalry-jealousy pattern was subliminal is hard to say; but not, by any means, was all of it so. Significantly, Edwin wrote to Harry DeForest Smith as early as March 11, 1894, betraying a conscious awareness of the conflict that continued: "Your third belated letter came Saturday, and I was glad to hear that you are coming home in a fortnight. You say that your time will be pretty well taken up, but you may be willing to take one or two brief vacations and listen to my five wild sketches—not including 'Marshall.' I have another in my mind on the philosophical enmity of two brothers who were not born for the same purpose." [italics added]
In any case, knowing that the rivalry existed makes it easier to hear the bitter overtones in poems that seem indubitably to be portraits of Hennan Robinson. "Richard Cory" comes first to mind because it is a nearly perfect representation of Edwin's next older brother; but, since this poem was written early, it may have been merely a well-imagined projection of things to come or of things Robinson had observed. "Bewick Finzer," "Bokardo," and "Flammonde," however, are, as the Memoir suggests, among the poems closely associated with Hennan.
Cory, rich, "imperially slim," perfectly schooled in all the amenities, the most admired man in Tilbury Town, went home one day and "put a bullet through his head." Manifestly, Hennan took the slower, more measured, course of drink; but the result was the same, almost as though he sought death. How much more sharply the irony penetrates, though, if we know about the myth! It is double-edged.
[. . .]
We have already seen, in an examination of those poems that reflect personal history, Robinson's involvement with the problem of failure in our lives. Why he devoted so many of his writing hours to this subject is not easily explained. Possibly he was motivated by his own failure to achieve recognition that he sought, a feeling that persisted in him for many frustrated years. Unquestionably, he was moved deeply by the tragic incidence of failure in the lives of his two brothers. It is apparent, however, that man as failure became for him a part of his cosmic view of the world he lived in. Perhaps the "why" was as inexplicable to him as the mystery of life itself. How he treated his failure-figure, whose faces peered over the edge of his writing table, sometimes despondently, sometimes hopefully, is of greater significance.
Broadly defined, the theme follows two patterns: one is the failure who seems to be beyond redemption, who does not, finally, possess the saving grace of character that would find favor in men's eyes, or who does not experience some inner change that would render less severe the general indictment against him. The other is the failure who for reasons of almost infinite variety is redeemed, exonerated, saved, or in whom the reader finds some aspect or some alteration of the inner man that lifts him from the shame of complete ignominy.
The first of these types is not so numerous as the second, but he is distinctly marked, even then. While in another relationship Richard Cory was considered in the preceding chapter, he falls into the general class of the failure; and the poem in which he is the central figure lives because it is a powerful statement of an inner, even if an undefined, tragedy in the life of one man. The external man the "people on the pavement" praised and envied and acknowledged; for Cory, to them, seemingly had everything. What private sense of failure, what personal recognition of his own inadequacy, or what secret unfulfilled longing drove Cory to suicide Robinson does not say; he leaves the reason for his readers to determine. But the crashing climactic moment of the night that Richard Cory "went home and put a bullet through his head" appalls every reader with its suddenness. After he has recovered from his shock and has reflected upon the intensity of the poem created by the contrast of the somber people of the community on the one hand and the brilliant heroic stature of Cory on the other, the reader is left with a sharp sense of emptiness, of a life wasted, of failure—and of Cory's hidden agony.

from Edwin Arlington Robinson. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1968. Copyright © 1968 by Twayne Publishers.

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Radcliffe Squires

The suicide of Richard Cory is not, or ought not to be, a surprise. It is an inevitability, predetermined by the subjugation of selfhood. Even more significantly, however, the subjugated self reclaims itself in the act of suicide. Not that the poem recommends suicide as a way of asserting individuality. Rather, it observes an extreme gesture in an extreme case. To see the poem in this way is to see it as neither bitter nor negative, at least not entirely so. We read ill if we cannot see that Richard Cory is granted an oblique triumph at the end, for he has refused to suppose himself made happy by what "everyone" supposes will make him everyone happy. In short, Richard Cory’s self emerges neurotically perhaps; still it emerges triumphant over the imposed role of "success."

From Edwin Arlington Robinson: Centenary Essays. Ed. Ellsworth Barnard. Copyright © 1969 by the University of Georgia Press.

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J.C. Levenson

"Richard Cory" conceals its powerful particularity by appearing almost tritely conventional. But since the surprise ending of Cory’s suicide does not, after a first reading, surprise anyone but the "we" of the poem, it is worth looking for deeper causes of its hold on readers. One the one hand, there is Robinson’s tact in presenting the title figure. By his scheme, moral blindness is overcome, not by factitious insight into another mind, but by respectful recognition of another person. So he avoids the nineteenth-century, common-sense method of realistic characterization and gives us nothing of his subject’s motives or feelings. He sketches in Cory’s gentlemanliness and his wealth, but not his despondency, and he lets the suicide seal the identity of the man forever beyond our knowing or judging. On the other hand, he can characterize the chorus just because they lack individuality, and he invites us to judge their blindness on pain of missing the one sure meaning of the poem:

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.

They do not serve who only work and wait. Those who count over what they lack and fail to bless the good before their eyes are truly desperate. The blind see only what they can covet or envy. With their mean complaining, they are right enough about their being in darkness, and their dead-gray triviality illuminates by contrast Cory’s absolute commitment to despair.

From Edwin Arlington Robinson: Centenary Essays. Ed. Ellsworth Barnard. Copyright © 1969 by the University of Georgia Press.

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Wallace L. Anderson

In April 1897 Robinson, reporting the local news to Harry Smith, wrote "Frank Avery blew his bowels out with a shot-gun. That was bell." By the end of July he had completed, he told Miss Brower, "a nice little thing . . . . There isn't any idealism in it, but there’s lots of something else - humanity, may be. I opine that it will go." It has become one of the most familiar of Robinson's poems. But poems, like people, sometimes suffer from what familiarity so often breeds. This is especially true if the work appears to be fairlv simple and uncomplicated. It may be what led Yvor Winters to remark that "In 'Richard Cory' . . . we have a superficially neat portrait of the elegant man of mystery; the poem builds up deliberately to a very cheap surprise ending; but all surprise endings are cheap in poetry, if not, indeed, elsewhere, for poetry is written to be read not once but many times." This remark is itself surprising, for not all surprise endings are cheap, nor does a surprise ending prevent a work from being read with pleasure more than once. The use of surprise is a legitimate device that occurs in all literary forms. The issue is not whether the reader has been surprised but whether the author has so prepared his ground that the ending is a justifiable one, consistent with the total context. Actually, "Richard Cory" has a rich complexity that becomes increasingly rewarding with successive readings.
A wealthy man, admired and envied by those who consider themselves less fortunate than he, unexpectedly commits suicide. Cory's portrait is drawn for us by a representative man in the street, who depicts him as "imperially slim," "a gentleman from sole to crown," "richer than a king." An individual set apart from ordinary mortals, Cory is, in their opinion, a regal figure in contrast to his admiring subjects, "the people on the pavement." This contrast between Cory and the people, seemingly weighted in favor of Cory in the first three stanzas, is the key to the poem. Nowhere are we given direct evidence of Cory's real character; we are given only the comments of the people about him, except for his last act, which speaks for itself. Ironically, Cory's suicide brings about a complete reversal of roles in the poem. As Cory is dethroned the people are correspondingly elevated. The contrast between the townspeople and Cory is continued in the last stanza. The people

worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

but they went on living. Cory, wealthy as he was, did not live; instead, be "put a bullet through his head." This occurred "one calm summer night." Calm, that is, to the people, not to Cory. Because the people "went without the meat, and cursed the bread," it might seem that life was both difficult and meaningless to them. But difficulty is not to be equated with meaninglessness; in fact, Robinson is suggesting just the opposite. "Meat" and "bread" carry biblical overtones that remind us that man does not live by bread alone. It is "the light" that gives meaning. In opposition to meat and bread, symbols of physical nourishment and material values, light suggests a spiritual sustenance of greater value. As such it clarifies the intent of the poem, for it reveals the inner strength of the people and the inadequacy of Cory. Belief in the light is the one thing the people had; it is the one thing Cory lacked. Life for him was meaningless because he lacked spiritual values; he lived only on a material level. Once this is realized, the characteristics attributed to Cory in the first three stanzas take on added significance and become even more ironic: He was "a gentleman from sole to crown" (appearance and manner); he was "clean favored" and "slim" (physical appearance); he was "quietly arrayed" (dress); he was "human when he talked" (manner); he "glittered" (appearance); he was "rich" (material possessions); he was "schooled in every grace" (manner). "Glittered" not only emphasizes the aura of regality and wealth but also suggests the speciousness of Cory. Even his manner is not a manifestation of something innate but only a characteristic that has been acquired ("admirably schooled"). All these details are concerned with external qualities only. The very things that served to give Cory status also reveal the inner emptiness that led him to take his own life.

From Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Critical Introduction. Copyright © 1967 by Wallace L. Anderson.

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David Perkins

"Richard Cory" concentrates on a particular character. The poem is no lyric self-expression, but an impersonal, objective report. The setting is an American town of the time, the provincial imagination engrossed and dazzled by a figure of consummate gentlemanly elegance (of royalty, as the townsfolk take it, if one regards a counterpoint in the images "crown," "imperially slim"). The idiom, though cultured, is colloquial, not in the least "poetic." Except at the end, the poem selects the most ordinary incidents as points of focus and plays down emotion.
Above all there are the irony and humor from which the poem chiefly derives its effectiveness. The surprise ending may be a little easy, and the implied moral--something like "how little we really know about the lives of others!"--may be trite. (The "idea" of the poem, Douglas Bush suggests to me, may have been taken from a bit in Bleak House, chapter 22.) But what matters is the attitude of the speaker toward himself and especially toward the other townspeople: his self-awareness, ironic distance, and detached amusement with the human comedy. The poem is subtle, however, and it is easier to sense this attitude than indicate its source. It depends very much on the characterization of the speaker through language, syntax, and metrical form. The idiom ("clean favored," "in fine") is itself "admirably schooled," the syntax controlled and orderly, and the neatness of the quatrains further contributes to the impression. One infers that the speaker is an educated man and hence that his self-identification with the too-admiring townsfolk is half ironic, a circumstance that becomes especially clear in the exaggeration of the lines,

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread.

The speaker has a self-conscious, fastidious awareness of his language. In the phrase, "yes, richer than a king," the "yes" means, "yes, we even used the stock cliché," and one thus understands that the phrasing throughout is adjusted in irony to convey the sayings and feelings of the townsfolk more than his own--for example, the subtly telling cliché, "from sole to crown," or the excessive enthusiasm (and bathetic fall) in the phrase "imperially slim." A speaker so aware must also be aware of the discrepancy between the commonplace actions of Cory (going down town, saying "good-morning," or simply walking) and the reactions of the townspeople (staring from the pavement, "fluttered pulses," their feeling that Cory "glittered when he walked"). Even the initial metrical inversion of the third line ("He was") counts by glancing invidiously at "we" others. The result is a reflective, shrewdly humorous portrait by implication of the town and townsfolk. Low-keyed, cerebral, ironic, impersonal, mingling humor and seriousness and implicating a whole social milieu, the poem was without precedent or even parallel in the 1890s.

From A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Copyright © 1976 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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Charles Sweet, Jr.

"Richard Cory," one of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s most anthologized poems, is also one of the least examined. Those critics who have considered the poem cast it in a familiar mold: that Richard Cory’s "soul is black with despair," that the people possess "the light," and that finally the people ironically fail to see their wishing to he like Cory is ultimately ludicrous because of their own intrinsic spiritual values.
The main problem with the popular interpretation is that it fails suitably to account for the tale being filtered through the mind of a narrator, a single one of the "people on the pavement." The resulting view tends to thrust Richard Cory into the spotlight and de-emphasize the character of the narrator. Perhaps we would do well to remember D. H. Lawrence’s admonition, "Trust the tale, not the teller," and begin to view Richard Cory through the eyes of an unreliable, unaware narrator. Moreover, such a focal point has the distinct advantage of helping to explain why Richard Cory really committed suicide.
As "Richard Cory" is only sixteen lines, we scarce need be reminded at the beginning that because of its compactness each word becomes infinitely important. While stanza one introduces the narrator, more importantly it emphasizes his limited view of Richard Cory. Line one introduces us to Cory while line two establishes that the narrator has only an external view of Cory. From this viewpoint, then, the narrator proceeds to make an assortment of limited value judgements. Richard Cory resembles a king ("crown," "imperially slim," and "richer than a king") ; obviously the speaker’s imagery (as well as movement in "sole to crown") reveal his concerns with Cory’s status and wealth (further emphasized by "glittered"). Charles Morris notes the speaker’s use of anglicisms ("pavement," "sole to crown," "schooled," and "in fine") pictures Cory as "an English king;" thus, the narrator can be seen expressing prejudices in terms of nationalistic pride.
Stanza two, however, appears to contrast and even contradict the previously established viewpoint. Lines five and six offer a different wording from any other lines as the "And he was always . . ." contrast with "(And) he was. . ." of lines three, nine, and eleven where the emphasis is on Cory’s regal nature; not only the repetition of a similar structure in successive lines but also the addition of the word "always" suggest that while external appearances seem eternal verities, they are only temporary illusions. Whereas Richard Cory seems at times like a king the narrator admits he is always "quietly arrayed" and "human." Thus, the speaker appears to contradict himself, or, more exactly, state the truth about Richard Cory: Cory is not a king; he is human. The narrator then confesses to his own hyperbole, his own exaggerated viewpoint of the man. In the next lines the narrator even acknowledges ("But still") the collective fault of the people; the lines might be paraphrased as follows: even though we knew deep inside us Cory was human, something else inside compelled us to blow up his proportions ("he fluttered pulses" and "he glittered"). The narrator admits essentially to this view in lines eleven and twelve:

In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

Why the people feel such a need has already been suggested by the representative narrator’s types of envy. Charles Burkhart remarks that their view of Cory is "a familiar illusion which brightens their drab lives." Yet even these reasons conceal the deepest motivations. In fact, to understand the final effects of Cory on the people we need to see precisely what other information the narrator reveals and place it in its proper perspective.
In light of the narrator’s attitude line one establishes that it is Richard Cory who comes down town; in other words, Richard Cory makes an attempt to communicate with the people. His activity contrasts with their passivity or stasis ("on we worked and waited"). Consonant with his general communicative attempts in line eight the very "human" Richard Gory tries to talk with the people. As nowhere in the poem is it suggested that the people try to come to Richard Cory, nowhere is it either intimated that they approach him, much less respond to him. Quite simply the people have erected a barrier around themselves and their only reaction to Cory is stasis and silence. The phrase "when he talked" even suggests that Cory makes more than a toekn effort. The importance of communication is revealed through a familiar Robinson image — light. In line thirteen the speaker claims the people "waited for the light" but in line eight the narrator has admitted that Richard Gory "glittered." We need not be reminded by Charles T. Davis that light in the early Robinson represents "the perception of spiritual truth" and in the later Robinson, "the understanding or truth in human relationships" to see that Richard Cory becomes a Promethean figure bringing the word of the necessity of human communication for survival. Cory, not the people, then, is the man of spiritual values (such a context is suggested by the obvious religious overtones of "meat," "bread," and "light"). The first three stanzas are not, as Wallace Anderson believes, "seemingly weighted in favor of Cory;" they are weighted in favor of Cory.
Richard Cory’s suicide can thus be seen in a different light. Instead of suicide because of "inner emptiness" or "an absolute commitment to despair," or because he was "sick," we are presented with a case of regicide; the townspeople with some degree of consciousness have extinguished the light. The irony of the ending, then, is not that the people were endowed with greater values than Cory or that simply they failed to understand his message, or even that the light they sought glowed in their midst all the time. The irony is that through their own mental prejudices and unfounded exaggerations the people, like eagles, claw at Prometheus so that the chains of inhumanity imprison him forever; it matters not that it is Cory who pulls the trigger since the people have pointed a weapon at his temple.
Furthermore, it is probative to examine the speaker’s voice to establish the results of enforced alienation. The tone of the last two lines is pure matter-of-factness; nowhere does the narrator betray any emotion over Cory’s death, and we might go so far as to say there is a certain satisfaction in the narrator’s voice. Whereas the narrator had once looked up at Richard Cory’s "crown," he now looks down at simply "his head." Appropriately the poem closes in darkness.
It obviously becomes necessary, then, to see Richard Cory certainly in more heroic proportions but also as more of a catalyst than focal point. "Richard Cory" is not a painting of a gentleman, but a portrait of the portraiteer. The poem serves as an indictment of those who study at a distance, of those who fail to get a feel of their subject, and of those who let petty personal emotions deprive themselves of human companionship. While Robinson’s temporal assessment may be exaggerated, his remark to Esther Willard Bates while walking up West Peterborough that he was "perhaps, two hundred years in advance of his time . . . in . . . his absorption in the unconscious and semiconscious feelings and impulses of his characters" points to our need not to judge by appearances either when we examine his poetry.

From "A Re-Examination of ‘Richard Cory.’" Colby Library Quarterly 9 (1972).

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Richard Gray

In ‘Richard Cory' he explores the anonymous surfaces of life in another way - by suggesting, however cryptically, the contrast between those surfaces and the evident hell that lies beneath them. The character who gives the poem its title is described in admiring detail, from the perspective of his poorer neighbours. 'He was a gentleman from sole to crown', the reader is told, 'Clean favoured, . . . imperially slim' and 'rich - yes, richer than a king'. Comments like these hardly prepare us for the horror of the final stanza:

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

The irony of these lines, and the poem as a whole, depends on the contrast between the serenity of Cory's appearance and the violence of his death; its melancholy, upon our recognising that Cory - for all his privileges - is as acutely isolated and spiritually starved as anyone else. 'There is more in every person's soul than we think', Robinson observed once, 'Even the happy mortals we term ordinary . . . act their own mental tragedies and live a far deeper and wider life than we are inclined to believe possible in the light of our prejudices'. This is precisely the lesson that the 'we' of the poem, Cory's neighbours in Tilbury Town, never learn: the night on which Cory shoots himself remains 'calm' in their view, and the use of that word only underlines the distance between him and them.
Quiet desperation, the agony that Richard Cory's neighbours failed to notice, is a distinguishing feature of many of Robinson's characters. The despair may come, apparently, from emotional poverty ('Aaron Stark'), the pain of loss and bereavement ('Reuben Bright', 'Luke Havergal'), or the treadmill of life ('The Clerks'): whatever, it is palpably there in an awkward gesture, a stuttered phrase, a violent moment as in 'Richard Cory' or, as in 'The House on the Hill', the sense that behind the stark, simple words lies an unimaginable burden of pain. Many of Robinson's poems, in fact, derive their power from reticence, a positive refusal to expand or elaborate.

From American Poetry of the Twentieth-Century. Copyright © 1990 by the Longman Group UK Limited.

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John Lucas

Well, it isn't a perfect poem, but it is certainly a remarkable one.
. . . .
It has the plain-jane manner that Robinson loves to affect and as a result of which he gains for himself just the right amount of freedom to let otherwise unremarkable phrases stand out. Taken in context, the phrase "imperially slim," for example, has an almost sensuous, stipple, and therefore slightly mocking grace about it. "Richard Cory" is wry, grim, laconic: it is a typical Robinsonian perception of the bleak comedy of the human condition, and this perception features in much of his best--and worst--work. In addition, the poem has that first-rate anecdotal quality which Robinson shares with Hardy. . . .
More importantly, however, he also shares with Hardy the ability to tell a story in verse in such a way as to let the smallest and most insignificant detail take on meaning and value. (Even the "calm" summer night in "Richard Cory' isn't quite the irrelevant detail it may at first seem, though the point it is making is admittedly an obvious one.)

From Moderns and Contemporaries. Copyright © 1985 by John Lucas.

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William Pratt

Richard Cory, the wealthiest man in town, whose wealth, instead of making him happy, only makes him envied by the townspeople and isolated from them. He is a success in their eyes but a failure in his own, as we judge from the fact that, despite his high position in the town, he commits suicide. The motive for his suicide remains a mystery, for Robinson portrays him only from the outside, from the view of those who admired him and "thought that he was everything / To make us wish that we were in his place." Since the reason for his death can never be fathomed, Richard Cory is one of Robinson’s best-known but most enigmatic characters. No matter how many times they are read, the final lines of the poem "Richard Cory" never lose the shock of his sudden and unexpected end:

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Was it his conspicuous wealth, his lonely existence without family or kin, or perhaps some secret crime he committed that led him to take his own life? We never know; what we are left with is the darkness inside his soul, which only grows more impenetrable as one reflects on it. Robinson keeps himself out of the poem, letting it be told by the people of the town, the "we" who are left to puzzle it out at the end. Despite having a name symbolic of a noble family—Richard Cory rhymes with glory and evokes the name of Richard Coeur de Lion—Cory’s death leaves behind no other "king" in Tilbury Town.

from Singing the Chaos: Madness and Wisdom in Modern Poetry. Copyright © 1996 by the Curators of the University of Missouri

taken from: Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Criticism - Edwin Arlington Robinson

Much of Robinson's poetry contemplates the problem of how the self might separate itself from a rigid society, yet remain as a tutelary spirit. In the end Robinson's decision would seem to have been that this could best be done by eschewing the dramatic catastrophes--vengeance, martyrdom--and offering instead temperate ironies, cool understatements and a language calculated, like Wordsworth's, to heal. This decision, as one looks back now from the present with its poetry of scrimshaw, its poetry of sociology, requires one to say that Robinson chose not to write for any particular time, for "any particular time" likes to have salt in its wounds. Equally it requires that one say that Robinson wrote for all time, for "all time" wants to be made healthy and to survive.

From Edwin Arlington Robinson: Centenary Essays. Ed. Ellsworth Barnard. Copyright © 1969 by the University of Georgia Press.

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No poet ever understood loneliness or separateness better than Robinson or knew the self-consuming furnace that the brain can become in isolation, the suicidal hellishness of it, doomed as it is to feed on itself in answerless frustration, fated to this condition by the accident of human birth, which carries with it the hunger for certainty and the intolerable load of personal recollections. He understood loneliness in all its many forms and deities and was thus less interested in its conventional poetic aspects than he was in the loneliness of the man in the crowd, or alone with his thoughts of the dead, or feeling at some unforeseen time the metaphysical loneliness, the angst, of being "lost among the stars," or becoming aware of the solitude that resides in comfort and in the affection of friend and family--that desperation at the heart of what is called happiness. It is only the poet and those involved who realize the inevitability and the despair of these situations, "Although, to the serene outsider,/There still would seem to be a way."
The acceptance of the fact that there is no way, that there is nothing to do about the sadness of most human beings when they are alone or speaking to others as if to themselves, that there is nothing to offer them but recognition, sympathy, compassion, deepens Robinson's best poems until we sense in them something other than art. A thing inside its is likely to shift from where it was, and our world view to change, though perhaps only slightly, toward a darker, deeper perspective. Robinson has been called a laureate of failure and has even been accused (if that is the word) of making a cult and a virtue of failure, but that assessment is not quite accurate. His subject was "the slow tragedy of haunted men," those whose "eyes are lit with a wrong light," those who believe that some earthly occurrence in the past (and now forever impossible) could have made all the difference, that some person dead or otherwise beyond reach, some life unlived and now unlivable, could have been the answer to everything. But these longings were seen by Robinson to be the delusions necessary to sustain life, for human beings, though they can live without hope, cannot live believing that no hope ever could have existed. For this reason, many of the poems deal with the unlived life, the man kept by his own nature or by circumstance from "what might have been his," but there is always the ironic Robinsonian overtone that what might have been would not have been much better than what is--and, indeed, might well have been worse; the failure would only have had its development and setting altered somewhat, but not its pain or its inevitability.

from James Dickey (1965)

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The inevitably ambivalent sense of being haunted by the canons of the past was a dominant subject of Robinson's early work, which obsessively tropes the inhibition and futility that these canonical shades engender in the aspiring writer. Robinson's restlessness toward his central canonical predecessors was manifested most productively in a procession of poems from his 1897 volume The Children of the Night that ingeniously thematize commonly understood notions of canonicity: "The Wilderness," "Ballade by the Fire," "The Clerks," "The House on the Hill," "The Pity of the Leaves," "Sonnet," "The Dead Village," "Ballade of Broken Flutes," and so on. While this mostly pessimistic thematization of poetry's value may be a litany of futility, it is far from being an exercise in futility. By exploring and problematizing the oppressive reverberation of past canons, Robinson's poems refract those anxieties into such conceptually ingenious and linguistically rich forms that the effort paradoxically becomes a demonstration of the continued imaginative value of poetry.
Several poems from The Children of the Night critique the model of the canon as a sacred space (academy, pantheon, museum, mausoleum) by associating it with rundown and obsolete physical structures that one might find in an deteriorating New England market town. In "The House on the Hill," for example, a view of an abandoned dwelling provides the setting for a psychological ghost story on the impotence of the canonical edifice the poet has inherited. Despite acknowledging three times that the former inhabitants "are all gone away," this speaker and his peers "still stray/ Around that sunken sill," unable to give up the notion of a canonical house on the hill. Since the tradition is in "ruin and decay," these efforts to communicate with the dead are met with utter indifference ("our poor fancy-play/ For them is wasted skill"), but they continue them nonetheless, their aimless obsessiveness cleverly echoed by the stubborn a-b-a rhymes of the villanelle structure. In an important sense, speaker and fellows have themselves prematurely adopted the role of ghosts, belatedly attempting to inhabit the scene of past vitality, unable fully to comprehend their status in limbo. Robinson also puts the other characteristic feature of the villanelle, the double refrain, to good use, the two repeated phrases embodying the two sides of contemporary poetry's dilemma: the decrepitude of its canonical inheritance is clear to see ("They are all gone away"),but this clarity makes no new directions possible, since "There is nothing more to say." It is hard to imagine a starker or more precise articulation of the impasse that American poets were faced with between 1890 and 1910.
While in general Robinson was no maven of mass culture, the canonical ghost topos also afforded him opportunities to thematize the excruciated relations between the traditionally elite genre of poetry and the forms and practices of contemporary material culture. "The Clerks," for example, ingeniously combines the theme of the reverberant canon with a meditation on the modern anxieties of cultural commodification. Here the poets of the past are figured as "a shop-worn brotherhood" hanging on "with an ancient air" ("I did not think I should find them there/ When I came back again; but there they stood"), who offer the speaker and his fellow poets a painful lesson in the futility of their own aspirations to join this canonical tradition: "And you that ache so much to be sublime,/ And you that feed yourselves with your descent,/ What comes of all your visions and your fears?/ Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time." The poem's description of shabby figures still "standing" in the same spot encourages us to think not only of the clerks in a dusty shop, but of their wares as well, books or other goods standing on neglected shelves, a display of cultural decay waiting helplessly for a consumer-reader who may well never come. This equation of creator (poet) with both seller (clerk) and object for sale evokes the anxiety that individualist cultural forms such as poetry would be submerged as America rushed headlong toward a totally commodified understanding of culture. What these clerks are unsuccessfully peddling, of course, is not only the material forms of poetry, but also an obsolete account of cultural value whose emphasis on sublimity and transcendence is unequipped to compete in the large-scale market economies of modernity. Having little or no hope of "selling," they can only persist in weaving intricate, ephemeral arabesques of their own redundancy, as they go on "Tiering the same dull webs of discontent," "Clipping the same sad alnage of the years."
In "alnage," an old word designating a quantity of material measured by the ell, Robinson again considers the notion of poetry as commodity, but does so in a way that registers at least a glimmering awareness of the need for the genre to develop a productive relationship with commodified modernity. The terms alnage and ell as units of measure derive from the length of the forearm (and are related etymologically to ulna and elbow), ingeniously figuring both the act of writing and the skeletal character of these decrepit clerk-poets. The finicking precision of small-minded clerks bent on getting an accurate measure of their goods pokes fun at the era's poetic traditionalists obsessed with precisely measuring out their lines, whom Robinson satirized more directly in "Sonnet" as "little sonnet-men" "Who fashion, in a shrewd mechanic way,/ Songs without souls, that flicker for a day,/ To vanish in irrevocable night." In this context, a significant element of the clerks' irrelevance is their reliance upon obsolete units of measure, as Robinson's choice of the flagrantly archaic "alnage" suggests. It follows that the mechanics of traditional poetic forms, no matter how shrewdly executed, are equally suspect. Thus the poem invites the conclusion that it is not commodification in itself that has made poetry culturally irrelevant, but instead, that poetry has stood still as the world has changed, and needs to generate new "measures."

Copyright © 1999 by John Timberman Newcomb.

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Robinson's first and last love was what he called 'the music of English verse'. As he explained to a friend, he was 'a classicist in poetic composition', who believed that 'the accepted media for masters of the past' should 'continue to be used for the future'. However, he was far from being one of the 'little sonnet-men' as he contemptuously referred to them, mere imitators of English fashions and forms. On the contrary, he was deliberately local: many of his poems are set in Tilbury Town, a fictive place based on his boyhood home of Gardiner, Maine. And he was a genuine original, obsessed with certain personal themes: human isolation, the tormented introversions of the personality, the doubts and frustrations of lonely people inhabiting a world from which God appears to have hidden His face. 'No poet ever understood loneliness or separateness better than Robinson', James Dickey has observed, ‘or knew the self-consuming furnace that the brain can become in isolation'. So his perennial subjects became what he termed ‘the slow tragedy of haunted men' - those whose 'eyes are lit with a wrong light', illusions that at once cripple and save them - and 'The strange and unremembered light/That is in dreams' - the obsessive effort to illuminate and make sense of experience when there is perhaps no sense to be made. 'The world is not a "prison-house"', Robinson declared, 'but a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of infants are trying to spell "God" with the wrong blocks'. Robinson saw himself and his poetic characters as particularly notable members of that kindergarten: people whose minds and language, their 'words' can never quite encompass the truth about the universe, the 'Word', but who nevertheless keep on trying.

If a formula could be given for a typical poem of Robinson, it would include the following elements: characterization; indirect and allusive narration; contemporary setting and recognition of the impingement of setting on individual lives; psychological realism and interest in exploring the tangles of human feelings and relationships; an onlooker or observer as speaker, making the poems impersonal and objective with respect to Robinson himself; a penchant for the humorous point of view combined with an awareness that life is more essentially tragic; a language that is colloquial, sinewy, and subtle as it conveys twists of implication in continually active thinking; a mindfulness of the difficulty of moral judgment but also a concern for it. Feeling that all this can justly be said, one wonders why Robinson's reputation is not higher. For one thing, readers are doubtless intimidated by the volume of his productivity. It is discouraging to face so fat a book, and, like most poets, he is more enjoyably read in selections than in toto. A less trivial cause is that, amid so much writing, a great deal seems bad, or more exactly put, it practices skills that seem less important at the cost of liabilities that now seem glaring.

From A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Copyright © 1976 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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The reasons that Edwin Arlington Robinson chose failure for his major theme--or that it chose him--can only be surmised. Presumably they have to do with his sensitivity to the plight of his addict brothers, his bankrupt father, his own alcoholism, and his monetary struggles through nearly the first half-century of his life. Moreover, there seems to have been something in his nature that made him more cerebral than physical in his response to the world. He was spiritual in his insistence upon a mystical being in the universe outside of humanity and greater than it; that much he had in common with Emerson and Whitman, both of whom he admired. But he could be only about half a Transcendentalist, unable to find the exuberance, the joie de vivre, that was given to them by their confidence in humanity's capacity to discover that stupendous entity and merge with it.
Robinson's fascinating characters typically are perplexed, unfulfilled, and disgruntled in various proportions. Sometimes that is because they do not quite know what hollowness plagues them or because they do not know where to search for truth or because they have searched but have been stymied in the quest. Of Robinson's famous title characters, the romantic failure Miniver Cheevy (inThe Town Down the River) lives in a past that never really was, curses the fate that landed him in the reality of the present, and drinks as a substitute for controlling his life. Bewick Finzer (also in The Town Down the River) invested so much of himself in money that when the money went, his selfhood went with it. Now, "Familiar as an old mistake, / And futile as regret," he haunts the townspeople, who help him because they recognize enough of themselves in him. Pathetic old Eben Flood (in Avon's Harvest, 1921) has no internal resources and has outlived all of his friends but for the jug, from which he is inseparable. Robinson's sense of humor plays through many of these and other poems (for example, though Cheevy never saw a Medici, "He would have sinned incessantly / Could he have been one"), but there is more sardonic wit than mirth in the laughter. He may have esteemed Emerson, but Robinson is often as condemnatory of the human race as Melville. The wife in "Eros Turannos" (in The Man Against the Sky: A Book of Poems, 1916) cannot leave her Judas of a husband because she is too proud and too afraid of loneliness, and so she lives in a home "where passion lived and died." The narrator of "Karma" (in Dionysus in Doubt: A Book of Poems, 1925) tells of a moral bankrupt who has wrecked a friend in a business venture and atones by giving a sidewalk Santa "from the fullness of his heart . . . / A dime for Jesus who had died for men." Robinson's Cassandra (in The Man Against the Sky) sums up one of the human sins: she inveighs against the exchange of material sin for spiritual values and self-esteem in human affairs:

"Your Dollar, Dove and Eagle make
    A Trinity that even you
Rate higher than you rate yourselves;
    It pays, it flatters and it's new.

The home-grown prophetess is as well received as the classical Cassandra. The crowd laughs; "None heeded, and few heard." The multitudes who pray to the new Trinity do so at their dire peril, Robinson held. Even when such an apparent success as Richard Cory (in The Children of the Night, 1897) seems to have all that modern people wish for, there is such emptiness at the core that, inexplicably to all who envy him and subscribe to his values, Cory chooses a "calm summer night" to go "home and put a bullet through his head." Sometimes the weight of the world bore so heavily upon Robinson that death looked attractive. In "How Annandale Went Out" (in The Town Down the River), the solution, haltingly spoken by a distraught physician, is euthanasia.
[Excerpted from a longer essay. See the book for the full version.]

from Modern American Poetry: 1865-1950. Ed. Alan Shucard, Fred Moramarco, and William Sullivan. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by G.K. Hall & Co.

taken from: Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign