[In the essay below, Morris argues that Robinson's choice of British-sounding words in “Richard Cory” evokes the class divide between Richard Cory and the townspeople who narrate the poem.]

Holding a different view on Edward Arlington Robinson's “Richard Cory” from that which marks Mr. Burkhart's comment (explicator, Nov., 1960, xix, 9), I am inspired to try again. Cory is made a king, it is true, but, judging from “pavement,” “sole to crown,” “clean favored,” “imperially slim,” “schooled,” and “in fine,” he is made an English king. For “pavement” we Americans would say “sidewalk”; for “from sole to crown” we would say “from head to foot.” Physically, this “gentleman”—a word used with special overtones in England—was “clean-favored”; Americans might say “trim” or “shapely.” And his education? He was “schooled in every grace”; to the English it would probably mean “trained in the arts of leisure.” “In fine”—we would say “in short”—he seemed to be everything and to have everything. Yet, “He put a bullet through his head.” Why?

Amy Lowell gives us part of the answer in describing the English character of Gardiner, Maine, in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917, p. 11). “I know of no place in America,” says Miss Lowell, “so English in atmosphere as Gardiner, Maine. Standing on the broad, blue Kennebec, the little town nestles proudly beside that strange anomaly in an American city—the Manor House.” And yet, a part of all this, Richard Cory, possibly resembling one of the descendants of that arch-Tory of the American Revolution, Dr. Silvester Gardiner of Gardiner, put a bullet through his head. In one sense, he belonged to the past of the aristocratic English gentleman living in a modern democratic society just as irrevocably as Miniver Cheevy belonged to the past of the medieval knight. In another sense, while the suicide and character of Frank Avery, “who blew his brains out with a shotgun,” might have inspired the portrait of Richard Cory, Robinson's love of Hardy's “Life's Little Ironies” might explain why he used so many anglicisms in portraying the man “who put a bullet through his head.”