Richard Cory

Introduction

In “Richard Cory” Robinson achieves an even more sophisticated use of the ambivalent stance than he does in “Doctor of Billiards.” Instead of denying intensity of feeling to avoid the suggestion of bitterness as he does in “Doctor,” Robinson uses controlled tonal contradictions in “Richard Cory” to suggest a highly sophisticated social demeanor, a judicious flexibility. He can criticize Tilbury's citizens with a light sarcasm, but he can also embrace and share in their responses (Reif, pp. 6), and he can do so effortlessly and apparently without fear of loss of identity or loss of prestige.

Discussion

Therefore, delicately interwoven are the alterations of Robinson's poetic stance, parodic and ingenuous, that the reader of “Richard Cory” is from line to line, even phrase to phrase, forced continually to adjust and readjust his assessment of the poet's stance vis-à-vis the “people” and Cory himself. The technique here, representing a refinement of the manipulation of essentially antagonistic attitudes, finds not even an approximate parallel in the organizational habits of the letters, yet the strategy clearly grows out of an ambivalent habit of mind. The triumph of “Richard Cory” lies in the poet's ability to satirize a culture and its values while at the same time maintaining a sophisticated control, both artistic and social (Felleman, pp. 454). By, seeming in his own more highly conscious and more naturally cultivated voice, to participate in the very views of the town that he almost at the same time satirizes, the poet comes very close to ridiculing Tilbury without paying any price in terms of the inevitable suggestion of personal bitterness, difficult to avoid in any statement of contempt, literary or social.

So refined are the distinctions between these positions in terms of language that most readers satisfied to find the poem merely a statement about how far apart appearance and reality may be; if the poet pays any price for his clever management of an ambiguous stance, it is in the super subtlety of the relations he establishes within the poem. Not until 1976, did David Perkins point out that the poet's relationship to the “people” in the phrase “we people” is “half-ironic,” and that clichés like “sole to crown,” “richer than a king,” and “went without the meat, and cursed the bread” represent a parodic adoption of the collective “voice” of Tilbury Town, with its overawed appreciation of financial success and the Protestant work ethic (Donaldson, pp. 553). Perkins comments also on the exaggerated reactions of the town to Cory's most mundane gesture; he “glittered,” and his greeting “flutters pulses.” Again these overreactions suggest the narrowness of the town's view of Cory in relation to that of the accomplished speaker, whose phraseology (“admirably schooled,” “in fine”) is relatively colloquial but nonetheless suggestive of a broader and better educated sensibility. Perkins rightly calls the poem an “indictment of a cultural milieu” (ibid).

However, even such a sensitive reader as Perkins might go further with the poem by considering the various moments when the poet's own more cultivated voice seems ...