Blog 14

“Richard Cory” by Edwin Robinson was a short poem written about a very rich man who everyone liked. Richard Cory was young, rich, and likeable. He was very popular in his town, everyone knew him and admired him. Everyone in the town wanted to be him. In the poem it says “he was always human when he talked.” (Robinson).  I think this means that he was always nice to people and treated everybody nice. He was the richest person in the town and a lot of people in the town could not even afford to eat meat. Everyone in the town thought that since Richard had so much money, and could afford nice things, that he would also be the happiest man in the town, but that was not true. Apparently, Richard was not very happy with his life, because he ends up killing himself at the end of the poem. I was very surprised when I read this because he seemed like he was very happy. The way that he was described in the poem, he sounded like he had a very good life. He was popular and everyone loved him. The fact that Richard Cory shot and killed himself means that he probably was not very happy with his life after all. I think that he just appeared to be happy on the outside to hold his reputation. I feel bad for Richard Cory because he was so focused on having a lot of material goods and being rich that he missed out on the good things in life that you can not buy with money.

The poem “Richard Cory” reminds me of Thoreau. I think that since Edwin Robinson made Richard Cory end up committing suicide, it shows that Edwin Robinson did not value money and material items very much and that he believed that there are other things in life that can make you happy. This is definitely something that Thoreau believed in as well. He believed that “America has been ‘ruined by luxury and heedless expense’” (Grant) and he accuses American men “of being obsessed with acquiring material goods; and of having a mistaken

conception of work, which exists only to feed artificial needs.” (Grant). I think that Thoreau and Robinson had some like philosophies on wealth and material items.

Bibliography

Grant, P. B. "Individual and Society in Walden." McClinton-Temple, Jennifer ed. Encyclopedia of

Themes in Literature. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. (accessed March 6, 2012).

Robinson, Edwin. "45. Richard Corey. Edwin Arlington Robinson. Modern American Poetry." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online. Web. 06 Mar. 2012.