The Suicide of Richard Cory: An Explication of the Poem by Edwin A Arlington Robinson

The termination of my tenure of office finds me turning back to my own adolescence, when I first developed those interests that were gradually crystallized into the serious pursuit of psychoanalysis as a profession. My personal sturm und drang drew me on the one hand to the haunting poetic works of Edwin Arlington Robinson and, on the other, to the scientific ideas of Sigmund Freud, who seemed to offer explanations for my own disturbing inner passions, some of which were undoubtedly reflected in the New Englander's poems.

Robinson has continued to interest me because he was a psychological poet whose life work was an essay on the loneliness of man and because of the accuracy with which he described the ironies of man and becuase. It is pleasant to have one's personal preferences vindicated by critics one respects. Edmund Wilson (1952), James Dickey (1965), and Irving Howe (1963), although they grant him some serious flaws, regard him as New England's greatest poet. As Howe puts it: “Though not so brilliant a virtuoso as Frost, Robinson writes from a fullness of experience and a tragic awareness that Frost cannot equal. No other American poet commands so rich a sense of moral life” (p. 24).

Several years ago, when I subscribed to the Colby Library Quarterly, an established source of much Robinson material (he was from Maine),