SOURCE: “‘Comprehensive Criticism’: A Humanistic Discipline,” in Bucknell Review, Vol. 10, No. 4, May, 1962, pp. 313-21, 324-25.

[In the following excerpt, Garvin elaborates on his earlier ideas about “Richard Cory” in the course of discussing a new method of criticism. Garvin stresses the importance of Robinson's choice of and attitude toward the poem's narrator.]

In critical analyses of artists of the highest rank like Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe—and even of their major individual works—all the critical methods and all relevant objective, subjective, and cultural elements can, in principle, be fruitfully used. A practical critic, especially one doing comprehensive criticism, should be austere and discriminating in what he tries to make relevant, and he should remember how short-winded readers of criticism can be. In my attempt to animate some of these generalizations on relevance and comprehensive criticism, I shall therefore analyze Edwin Arlington Robinson's “Richard Cory” rather than a major work. My purpose is not to write a model comprehensive criticism—I am suspicious of models—but to indicate, in a self-conscious way, what is involved in doing a comprehensive criticism of even a single poem. Here I shall be more concerned with the method of inquiry than with my own resulting interpretation.

Recently I have become interested in why we respond to famous poems with ready-made appreciations and why, if on our own we manage to achieve rich impressions, we gradually lose the vibrancy of the impressions, with the result that our first emotions towards a famous poem will in later readings be recalled but no longer be felt. Does the fault lie in the failure of sensitiveness in the reader or in the exhausted aesthetic possibilities in the poem? My experiences with “Richard Cory” raise these as well as other questions and suggest a few answers.

I had never had a deep aesthetic experience with “Richard Cory” because it seemed, though arresting enough, to have but little depth and artistry. After teaching the poem a number of times I finally became thoroughly bored by it. One day, to demonstrate to a class that slight changes in interpretation require the oral reader to change his tone and emphasis, I changed arbitrarily my notions of the “people on the pavement” and thereby got my first clue that “Richard Cory” is more complex and meaningful than I had originally thought. Working with the text alone, and with only a casual knowledge of Robinson's poetry, I finally arrived at an interpretation that went considerably beyond the usual remarks about Robinson's ironic treatment of appearance and reality and of the mystery of life, and about Richard Cory's lack of purpose in life. I went to my colleagues and then to published criticisms of the poem. I soon concluded that Robinson had many reasons to complain, enigmatically, that this famous poem, very quickly “pickled in anthological brine,” was not properly understood. If “Richard Cory” is really as good as it is famous, then it deserves a more careful study than it has received.

To be sure, “Richard Cory” has its detractors. Critics with a subtly developed need for complexity in concrete imagery probably find this poem pleasant enough, but casually dismiss it. Even a few critics who place Robinson among the very best American poets find it meretricious. Ben Ray Redman, for example, thinks that the last lines of the poem do nothing to develop Cory's character and display “a kind of easy trickery that Robinson has consistently and triumphantly avoided.” And Yvor Winters insists that only sentimentally romantic readers can be impressed by the “superficially neat portrait of the elegant man of mystery; the poem builds up to a cheap surprise ending.”

The critics who place “Richard Cory” near the summit of Robinson's explorations into appearance and reality have not been clear about the reasons for their pronouncements and have not penetrated much beneath one level of meaning. Emery Neff, not at all disturbed by the surprise ending, gives no specific reasons for considering it “secure among American classics.” Edwin S. Fussell suggests that the poem is one of the “landmarks” in American literature and lets the matter rest. Ellsworth Barnard believes that there is in Cory a “spiritual vacancy” leading to suicide but “no hint of hidden guilt … egotism … or failure in duty to one's fellow men. … Why this spiritual vacancy exists is a mystery.” Estelle Kaplan, for whom the suicide is apparently no mystery at all, gives no evidence whatsoever why “disgust and self-pity” brought Cory to destruction.¹ Remarks are not criticism.

I finally decided to explore my own interpretation (which by now had grown stubborn) and the critical remarks above by making a comprehensive study of the poem. I looked carefully into the biographical and critical studies of Robinson, into his letters and the reminiscences and letters of his friends, into his philosophy and his literary background, into the literary situation at the turn of the century, and above all into the rest of Robinson's poetry, particularly his poems about suicide and about indifference to others. (In this research I fortunately had one or two purposes independent of my interest in “Richard Cory.”) Frankly, a relatively small proportion of my inquiry into the cultural and subjective elements added significantly to my prior interpretation and evaluation of “Richard Cory” itself. But the inquiry confirmed and deepened some of my notions and hunches, changed others slightly, and made me aware of certain important matters that I now find imbedded within the poem but of which I would otherwise have remained ignorant, probably. Once I had picked up a scent, I found it hard to remain objective towards the evidence, but I at least kept returning to the poem itself in order to test my evolving notions of the poem. I insisted that the text bear witness to any outside material I felt might be relevant.

In brief, I now am convinced that “Richard Cory” is among the many finely good poems that have inexhaustible aesthetic possibilities. I have discovered a depth of poetic indirection, of insight, and of meaning in the character and in the poem. In the concluding lines Robinson is not playing a trick but rather is bringing out the dramatic colors that, adumbrated throughout, are altogether necessary to complete the portrait of Richard Cory. Though Robinson's verbal imagination is adequate only, all his best poems (among which “Richard Cory” unobtrusively belongs) have an abundance of other kinds of complexity and beauty. I am proposing that “Richard Cory” illuminates much more than the surprising differences between appearance and reality, that Cory does not have a temperamental but rather a moral flaw because of which “we people on the pavement,” aware of the flaw, judge him bitterly, that when Cory kills himself the townspeople feel neither a long surprise nor a sadness but rather a retributive satisfaction, and finally that the townspeople are also being judged by Robinson.

It is important to note that “Richard Cory” is the only Robinson poem in which the sullen poor, the people on the pavement, are clearly the ones who narrate a whole poem. Generally, when some kind of evil consumes a character, Robinson has another character (as in “Bokardo”) or the whole town (as in “Aaron Stark”) tell the tale. There are several reasons, as we shall see, why Robinson chose the sullen poor to tell about Richard Cory. Let us return to the text.

The people on the pavement cursed their lean sustenance (“the bread”) and went altogether without “the meat”—and looked at Richard Cory whenever he went downtown. (Bread and meat have here primarily an economic and social meaning rather than a Biblical allusiveness.) They naturally wished they were in his place, but all along they had quiet questions about this gentleman from sole to crown, richer than a king. Why didn't he just possess naturally the external graces instead of being “admirably schooled” in them? He was always quietly arrayed, but does a true gentleman glitter when he walks? He was always human “when he talked,” but why did he somehow seem less human before and after? And why did he not occasionally show a magnanimous awareness of their lot, since he had so much and they so little? His lack of genuine sympathy is pointedly implied by omission. So on the people worked and “waited for the light”—for at least some suggestion of answers to these and related questions. When Cory put a bullet through his head, they began to understand these cumulative hints of an inner despair and to suspect a hidden flaw in him; and then they felt a satisfaction in his suicide, a satisfaction that Robinson implies is understandable but hardly admirable.

Robinson himself deeply understands the hidden flaw that the people can suspect only. For Robinson, Cory's real flaw was probably his indifference to the sufferings of others; as Ellsworth Barnard points out, an indifference to others is a cardinal sin in Robinson's moral world.² Though Robinson, a subtile and humane moralist, deliberately leaves part of the mystery of Cory undisturbed, it is probable that Robinson saw that it was not so much the emptiness of a rich man's life that brought Cory to some earthly despair and to catastrophe but rather the sin of an indifference that can spread within and destroy. It is not incorrect to say that Richard Cory had no purpose in life, suffered from “spiritual vacancy,” and took a gentlemanly way out; but Robinson put into the poem some deeper reasons for the suicide.

One sometimes finds it hard to resist trying to make a subjective conviction relevant to an art object. Let me try out an observation. It is of course conceivable that a man can be led to suicide by mere emptiness and by an inability to love others or to experience any of the passions, even hate. But these weaknesses merely point to the notorious condition of numberless people who do not commit suicide or any other violence. Always do the Laodiceans wonder what possible anguish can bring anyone to self-violence. Emptiness and insensitiveness are, after all, relatively negative frailties except for those who at one time were able to feel passionately. But the imperial indifference of Richard Cory to the suffering of his townsmen, while he had the financial means to lessen their sufferings, is a positive, corrosive flaw that gradually brought him to an impassioned discontent. Whether or not Richard Cory put a bullet through his head primarily because of this corrosive indifference is impossible to prove; but the evidence within the poem itself makes it probable that at least the people and the poet feel that a deep moral flaw helped bring about Cory's doom. Let me turn to some evidence outside the poem to confirm and complement such a re-interpretation of the poem.

In many other poems Robinson reveals various shades of the indifference he saw in Richard Cory. Robinson kept his eye steadily on the little unremembered acts of indifference in his characters as well as on their remembered callous acts. For example, he touches subtly on kinds of indifference in “Alma Mater,” “Clavering,” “But for the Grace of God,” in parts of Captain Craig. And he moves grandiosely against the evil in “Zola”:

Never until we conquer the uncouth
Connivings of our shamed indifference
(We call it Christian faith) are we to scan
The racked and shrieking hideousness of Truth
To find, in hate's polluted self-defence
Throbbing, the pulse, the divine heart of man.(3)

Not so perceptively aware as Robinson was of Richard Cory's kind of indifference, the people on the pavement understood Cory better after his suicide, but they have not as yet forgiven him. Robinson understands Richard Cory more compassionately and has forgiven him as much as a moralist, even a cosmic moralist, can.

Robinson's tactic in letting the embittered people tell about Cory makes another maneuver possible for the poet—a maneuver that probably pleased an ironic moralist like Robinson.

Throughout Robinson's life and long career—he did not change any of his basic views—compassion and ironic understatement were two of the few ways he had of transcending his brooding, painful insights into frailties and evils. And his compassion unfailingly includes suicides. Robinson felt that even though a man confronting the sky can find more admirable and profound ways than self-destruction, a suicide at least reaches for some kind of self-determination and, at worst deserves some pity. In his art even more than in his personal life, Robinson went beyond pity and achieved a compassion and a sympathy for those who come to self-violence. He writes of the suspected suicide of one of his acquaintances:

He must have suffered hell during his latter days. … He was one of the most fascinating and (I may as well be honest) in some of the ways one of the most unhuman. He may have been inhuman also, but he was never that to me. So peace to him, wherever and whatever he is now. There was much in him that was good, and the rest is not … our affair. … A suicide signifies discouragement or despair—either of which is, or should be too far beyond the scope of our poor piddling human censure to require of our ignorance anything less than silence.⁴

In his poetry, Robinson is never bitter toward suicides, even when a character is morally worse than Richard Cory; for example, in “The Whip,” “The Mill,” “The Growth of Lorraine,” “Bon Voyage,” Roman Bartholow, Matthias at the Door, Amaranth, and King Jasper.⁵ And Robinson maneuvers throughout his poetry to avoid saying in his own personal voice bitter and despairingly pessimistic things. Critics much too readily identify Robinson with the narrators in his poems. When confronted by evil, he chooses his narrators carefully, and when seeming to speak in his own voice he always hits upon a mood and a moment in which he can treat evil with understanding rather than with heat, as in “Theophilus,” “Another Dark Lady,” and “An Old Story.”⁶ His insight into evil and indifference and his compassion for human kind in its travails give him a vantage point from which he can, as in “Richard Cory,” accept without rancor what he cannot manage to forgive quite.

And Robinson judges not only those who inflict harm but also those who endure it with rancor. Many of his poems deal with men and women who either succumb to rancor, or who overcome it even when outwardly they are defeated by the harm inflicted upon them (for example, Captain Craig, Lancelot, Lincoln, Roman Bartholow, John Brown, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Fernando Nash). By choosing the people on the pavement to tell the story of Richard Cory, Robinson maneuvers adroitly to suggest his own moral judgment upon these people even while they are bitterly judging Cory.

At this point we should recall that Robinson had a conservative view of social progress and of the goodness of man. He judged the millionaire and the coalheaver as individuals and was never sympathetic towards the lower classes as such. Indeed he made a few explicit and heavy-handed attacks on the mass mind, as in “The Master,” “Demos,” “Demos and Dionysus,” “On the Way,” and “The Revealer.”⁷ Robinson is especially critical of the mass mind when it is obtuse towards values and ideals and insensitive toward the unusual individual. This external evidence, it seems to me, makes it even more reasonable to believe that Robinson, though sharing and deepening the insight of the Tilbury poor into Richard Cory's flaw, did not share their rancorous satisfaction in his suicide and judged quietly their lack of forgiveness and compassion.

Such a reinterpretation of “Richard Cory” gives the poem a complexity and a subtlety that I find intrinsic to the poem itself. Many readers today have unfortunately stopped looking for the special kinds of poetic subtlety and ambiguity found characteristically in Robinson's poetry. …

In a comprehensive criticism it is especially necessary for the critic—since everything around the work can in principle be made relevant—to become clearly aware of what is not relevant to the work, or at least of what he himself cannot make relevant. The historical information I gathered is not, for example, fruitfully relevant to “Richard Cory” (1896); indeed, chronology and changes in texts are in general far less important in a criticism of Robinson than of Eliot, Dryden, Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer. In criticizing “Richard Cory,” to be sure, I could not make use of the knowledge I happen to have of the literary situation around 1895 or of the English, European, classical, Biblical, and American influences upon Robinson. If, however, I were to criticize Robinson's The Man Against the Sky (1916) or Tristram (1927), a knowledge of the cultural situation in the first three decades of the century could be made relevant. When Panofsky, Berenson, and Boas evaluate Medieval and Renaissance paintings, their knowledge of icons obviously helps them to understand what is in the paintings and to transform their impressions and opinions into critical judgments. A resourceful critic, in his interpretation and evaluation, can make use of the textual revisions by Emily Dickinson, Henry James, James Joyce, and of the various dates of composition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Prelude.

I was unable to make much use of the biographical and autobiographical material about Robinson I now have, other than what I have included above; “Richard Cory” is not an autobiographical poem. Indeed, in a literary sense I find autobiographical elements of highly limited critical relevance to Robinson's poems; the intentional fallacy is rarely a danger in criticisms of Robinson. Yeats, on the other hand, is a good example of a poet who deliberately supplied autobiographical information intended to help us elucidate his poems; and in the use of this information the critic of Yeats (as of Henry James and Proust) is confronted by special vantage points and special temptations and dangers.

In my analysis I was able to make use of Robinson's views—as revealed in letters and reminiscences as well as in his other poems—of democracy, the rich, and the mass mind because these views seem to be behind Robinson's subtle criticism of the people on the pavement. For a short time I thought that Thomas Masaryk's and Emile Durkheim's theories of suicide might be made relevant; but I finally decided that these theories are not directly related to “Richard Cory.” I do not see how a knowledge of the sociological elements in the background of Robinson's work can possibly do more than supply a critic of his poems with minor hints and confirmations here and there; whereas in a comprehensive criticism of Dreiser, Sandburg, Galsworthy, Tennyson, Dickens, a critic could readily make some of the sociological and other cultural elements relevant to their works.

Notes

1. For the reference to the critics mentioned above see, respectively, Ben Ray Redman, Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1926), p. 37; Yvor Winters, Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1946), p. 52; Emery Neff, Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1948), p. 259; Edwin S. Fussell, Edwin Arlington Robinson (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954), p. 183; Ellsworth Barnard, Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1952), p. 128; Estelle Kaplan, Philosophy in the Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1950), p. 36.

2. See Barnard, p. 127.

3. Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1930), p. 85. All page references for individual poems will refer to this edition.

4. Selected Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1940), pp. 126-127. See also pp. 97, 123; and Hermann Hagedorn, Edwin Arlington Robinson, a Biography (New York, 1938), p. 55; Denham Sutcliffe (ed.), Untriangulated Stars (Cambridge, Mass., 1947), pp. 108-137.

5. See pages 338, 460, 91, 351, 733 for the first five examples.

6. See pages 39, 41, 76 respectively.

7. See pages 317, 471-472, 904, 474, 359 respectively. There is external evidence in Robinson's letters and in the reminiscences of friends that the poems reflect with some accuracy many of Robinson's views. See, for example, Selected Letters, pp. 121, 123, 84.