Compare and Contrast Essay

Compare and Contrast Essay

Edwin Arlington Robinson was a bard of transition. He dwelled at the time following the Civil War when America was rebuilding and altering quickly and when the superior standards of the homeland appeared to be growing progressively materialistic. Robinson's verse was transitional, assessing the present by utilising customary types and by encompassing components of transcendentalism and Puritanism. The centre of Robinson's beliefs is the conviction that man's largest obligation is to evolve his best attributes as completely as possible (Byrne 2005) he was acutely cognizant of the religious edge of man and somewhat uninterested in the exterior facets of man's life as a communal creature.

Robinson's best renowned declaration on the hollowness of accepted achievement is the lyric verse, "Richard Cory". Although every individual values and envies Cory, one evening he blazes a projectile through his head. We are left inquiring why, and Robinson does not give an answer. We can only presume that what other persons believe and seem is not as significant as what an individual himself believes. Since Cory understands his life is useless in spite of his "success," he places an end to it.

In the other verses we glimpse Robinson's compassion and humour. They are distinctly combined in each poem. "Miniver Cheevy" is assessed by a very broad, hyperbolic humour.

Eliot attributed a large deal of his early method to the French Symbolists—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Laforgue—whom he first came across in school, in a publication by Arthur Symons called The Symbolist Movement in Literature. It is very easy to realise why a juvenile aspiring bard would desire to imitate these glamorous bohemian numbers, but their supreme effect on his verse is possibly less deep than he claimed.

Eliot values methods like pastiche and juxtaposition to make his points without having to ...