[In the following essay, Garvin advocates a fresh and careful rereading of “Richard Cory,” as well as of other poems whose impact has been blunted by fame.]

Famous poems have a ready-made audience with ready-made appreciations. If through a chance ignorance a reader comes innocently and freshly upon a famous poem, its reputation may subsequently bestill his first vibrant impressions, particularly if he teaches poetry, with the result that his first emotions toward the poem will readily be recalled but no longer be felt. Sometimes the immediate success of a fine poem—[Edwin Arlington Robinson's] “Richard Cory,” for example—keeps it from being read properly. Readers eventually exhaust the aesthetic possibilities of merely good poems; but a poem that is greatly good or even finely good is inexhaustible; and a failure in sensitiveness towards such a poem lies with the reader.

A peccant humour of the professor is a failure in sensitiveness towards anthological poems. Famous poems force their reputations and accepted meanings upon the unsure and the unwary teacher. And even if an experienced professor makes a careful study of the poem and actually experiences it deeply, his subsequent aesthetic perceptions into the whole poem, after teaching it a dozen times, may become as opaque as a native's glance at the lovely hills surrounding his town. We might mischievously inquire of a professor and of a critic which famous poems he still can read freshly and which he likes and interprets in accordance with the fashion, mainly because he himself has never studied or appreciated them closely.

It is not hard to find most of the reasons why we normally read anthological poems too smoothly. Often the famous lines in a poem roll so readily over our tongues and in our minds that we never analyze them quite. A mischievous inquirer can gather an enervating list of familiar quotations from Shakespeare that contain words with Elizabethan meanings that some of us have never learned and that have leaves of meanings or just a plain meaning we have never really attended to. The surface meanings of many famous poems are often sufficiently interesting to keep even analytical critics from feeling their usual need to penetrate to closer meanings. Ideally, the professor and the critic should be able to listen with a third ear.

A professor should be grateful when students drop disturbing elements into the rhythm of his worn interpretations of famous poems. The sovereign remedy for the peccant humour is the hardest: to possess the poem thoroughly. Without stopping to argue the points here, I shall maintain that achieving a full aesthetic experience with an excellent poem requires a mind rich in its knowledge of the cultural situation (involving historical, biographical, critical, psychological, sociological and philosophical elements surrounding the poem)—all directed towards the poem itself, though such knowledge can of course endanger the experience; and that it takes an even richer mind to understand one's experience and to evaluate the poem critically. But there are too many great poems to be mastered, even by a heroic teacher of poetry; and the professor must generally rely on more common remedies, which can provide an adequate if incomplete mastery and can help him sustain his sensitiveness towards a poem.

Merely by looking at nature, for example, one can sometimes see into a well-known image smoothed out through time and repetition. I had often read with vague pleasure Wordsworth's “The winds that will be howling at all hours, / And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers.” It was only recently that some winds moving loudly across a wooded hill in the Buffalo Valley and gradually becoming quiet and still made me think that Wordsworth had in mind the cheeks of Aeolus's winds blowing and then slowly folding themselves to sleep like the petals of flowers. My own intimations of reality and poetry often need some help, however. It was a student who made me feel that in “London, 1802” a moon-image would be more appropriate than the star-image. A critic made me realize that T. S. Eliot in “Excite the membrane, when the sense cooled / … multiply variety / In a wilderness of mirrors,” is probably referring to sexual restimulation helped by mirrors. For years I had believed I fully understood these favorite lines. And it never occurred to me until I began a close analysis of Robert Frost's “Come In” that the poem has many meanings, including a brief apologia for his inability to write “dark,” tragic poetry. The ways out of ignorance and insensitiveness are many.

Especially common is to find an anthological poem so satisfying on one level that readers many long overlook other possible levels of poetic intention and meaning. Let me summarize briefly a recent experience with a famous poem.

In demonstrating to a class that differing interpretations necessitate different oral readings, I led myself, partly by chance, into a full study of “Richard Cory” leading to a new interpretation, appreciation, and evaluation of the poem. Before making this study I had frankly become bored by the poem because its aesthetic possibilities seemed exhausted. I now believe that Robinson had many reasons to complain, enigmatically, that this famous poem, already “pickled in anthological brine,” was not properly understood. Some famous poems, like “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” have excited critical sensibilities despite the anthologies; the anthologies have somehow lulled the sensibilities of the readers of “Richard Cory.”

The interpretation I commonly found among critics and colleagues is that Richard Cory committed suicide because of his “spiritual vacancy” and his lack of purpose and that the “people on the pavement” are surprised by the self-violence of so imperial a man and are somewhat awed by the mystery of life. The evaluations of the poem move to extremes: it is either “a landmark” and “secure among American classics” or “a superficially neat portrait of the elegant man of mystery … (that) builds up to a cheap surprise ending.” My study of the cultural situation surrounding the poem has led me to conclude not that the usual interpretations are clearly wrong but that even when right they do not go deeply enough to illuminate what Robinson has subtly put into the text.

Richard Cory does not have an elegant, temperamental flaw but rather a moral flaw—the sin of indifference to others—of which “we people on the pavement” are bitterly aware. When Cory shoots himself, these people are not deeply surprised, and they do not feel any sadness but rather a retributive satisfaction. Robinson, a humane moralist, has more compassion for Richard Cory than they have. There is evidence within the poem and confirming evidence outside it to justify the belief that Robinson is judging the people for their rancorous satisfaction as well as Richard Cory for his moral flaw of indifference.

Such a re-interpretation suggests that “Richard Cory” has a greater depth of poetic indirection, of insight, and of meaning than is generally felt by readers. Though Robinson's imagery is adequate only, “Richard Cory”—like all his best poems—has other kinds of beauty and complexity.

Anthological poems like “Richard Cory” dramatize the professor's peccant humour of feeling what he is supposed to feel about a poem instead of what he really feels. He needs to make use of the many remedies to combat the slowly stultifying effects of familiarity, repetition, and the winds of interpretation. On guard, he can each semester study carefully two or three poems among the divers famous poems in an anthology in order to keep his peccant humor from becoming a formed disease.