Richard Cory, Edwin Arlington Robinson - Jerome Kavka (essay date 1975)
Jerome Kavka (essay date 1975)
SOURCE: “Richard Cory's Suicide: A Psychoanalyst's View,” in Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 3, September, 1975, pp. 150-59.
[In the following essay, Kavka responds to Charles A. Sweet's essay on “Richard Cory” with a diagnosis: “Richard Cory” (see above) is the portrait of a narcissist with borderline personality disorder.]
What prompts me, as a psychoanalyst, to interpret [Edwin Arlington] Robinson's famous poem, “Richard Cory,” is the intriguing thesis of Charles A. Sweet, Jr. that the poem is a depiction of an oedipal conflict with the suicide a realization of regicidal wishes.1 While psychologically plausible, Sweet's theory is not sufficiently capacious to account for Cory's disastrous deed or his highly unusual personality.
According to Sweet, Cory comes down town as a “Promethean figure bringing the word of the necessity of human communication for...
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