Edwin Arlington Robinson is a well-known poet who is the author of “Richard Cory”, “Miniver Cheevy”, and “Mr. Flood’s Party” and a number of other poems, in which he shows the reader loneliness and isolation of their characters, leading to their gradual degradation. In the first three poems under investigation, the action takes place in Tilbury Town although Robinson mentions its name, not in all of them.
In “Richard Cory” the author presents Richard Cory as the ideal man. People think of him to be a gentleman and a man by nature. Everyone in the town wants to be in his place or even to live his life. Everybody thinks him to be very lucky as he has a lot of money. He already has everything and people envy him as they have to work hard to earn their living. And then, this ideal man shoots himself. According to Richard Grey.
The irony of the poem depends on the contrast between the serenity of Cory’s appearance and the violence of his death; its melancholy, upon our recognizing that Cory – for all his privileges – is as acutely isolated and spiritually starved as anyone else (Modern American Poetry 10).
In Robinson’s poem “Miniver Cheevy,” the author describes a man who seems depressed. This poem shows the tragedy of the character who wished he were never born and then ends up telling the reader that the individual is an alcoholic. This person doesn’t want to be what he is. He wants to be another man, the one whom people would admire. But he can do nothing with himself as he has low spirits, bad luck and as a result, he can’t change his way of life. Wallace L. Anderson makes a conclusion that the poem is built on the ironic contrast between the unheroic Miniver as it is and his dreams of adventure, romance, and art associated with heroic figures of the Trojan War in ancient Greece, King Arthur’s knights in the Middle Ages, and the dazzling brilliance and corruption of the Medici in the Renaissance (Anderson 5).
The last poem, “Mr. Flood’s Party,” shows the loneliness of an old man. This tragedy leads to his alcohol intoxication described to the audience in the poem. Nobody wants to communicate with him; even his numerous friends close the door before him. These are friends who lead common life unlike him. They have nothing in common with him anymore, their lives are different. He is a weak man who cannot struggle, stand all the difficulties that he comes across in his life. And being unable to deal with all his troubles, he tries to solve them with the help of alcohol, but it only harms him and all those people who surround him. That’s why they want neither to communicate with him nor even see him. Ellsworth Barnard points out that this poem “shows the poet’s gift for compressing into a few seemingly effortless concluding lines the mood and theme of the whole” (Robinson, “Modern” 1).
In the poems “Richard Cory” and “Miniver Cheevy” Robinson depicts the main characters as outcasts of their community. They don’t have true friends and thus try to avoid meeting people. Despite these characters are similar in something, the author describes them differently. Richard Cory is admired by all the people in the town, unlike Miniver Cheevy; people look down on him and despise him. According to the citizens of the town, Richard Cory is the man who has everything. Everyone wants to be more like him, he has everything to make people desire to find themselves in his place. On the contrary, Miniver Cheevy has nothing that the people respect, he hasn’t done anything in his life and he craves to have at least some part of the adoration that Richard Cory has, the respect and noble qualities, “he is a gentleman from sole to crown” (Cory 2003). Miniver Cheevy wishes to be the idol that Cory is to the townspeople. “Richard Cory” is told by the author from the external side, so that the reader can’t understand Cory’s mind unlike the people on the street. Everybody in the town can’t believe that Cory, a happy person to their mind, puts a bullet in his head. Robinson doesn’t show the reader Cory’s mind and therefore he seems to be so miserable that he can’t stand people on the street watch at him and hate him every day. These characters are unaccepted in their own life and none of them can live another day. They both want to avoid the position they are in, they decide to do this in different ways. Richard Cory decides to take his life, and Miniver Cheevy drinks and imagines that he is a knight in medieval times. Robinson virtually chooses characters and puts them into absolutely different situations and ends the poems equally tragically.
In conclusion, it is necessary to say that “Richard Cory”, “Miniver Cheevy”, and “Mr. Flood’s Party” are dramatic poems, which show the loneliness of their characters and their uselessness to society they live in.
Works Cited
Anderson, Wallace L. “Modern American poetry”. 1996. Web.
Cory, Richard. “Richard Cory”. 2003. Web.
Modern American poetry. American Poetry of the Twentieth-Century. The Longman Group UK Ltd., 1990.
Robinson, Edwin Arlington. “Modern American poetry”. 1996. Web.
Robinson, Edwin Arlington. A Poetry in the Act. The Press of Western Reserve University, 1967.
Robinson, Edwin Arlington. Collected Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1921.