Criticism

David Kelly

David Kelly is a writer and instructor at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois. In the following essay, Kelly examines the role of

wealth in the poem, focusing on how it influences the reader.

Americans can rest comfortably with the knowledge that Richard Cory, miserable wretch, pulled the trigger on himself, thereby assuring us that the wealth most of us will never know is not worth having anyway. If Cory actually was the person the poem tells the reader he was, not just rich but also human, graceful and kingly, it would have been proof that one can rise to the top without getting a swelled head or losing touch with the people, and, frankly, that sort of unbridled success has to be treated with suspicion.

Interestingly, if Cory’s story happened today, someone would make a point to investigate this humanitarian millionaire, to find the business deal in his past that he concluded less than civilly, or the abandoned relative, or the pills or surgery that kept him so slim, or the child he bounced on his knee just a little too long.

The secret about Richard Cory’s suicide is not why it happened — the reader has some idea of why — but the fact that it seems so natural that he would do it. In theory, accumulation of wealth is what America’s economy is built on. Capitalism makes our society work, motivating citizens to get up out of their chairs, to build new things, to think and create and search for new solutions. Wealth is quite a motivator. Research scientists, for example, might drive themselves day and night in their search to cure diseases, simply out of love for mankind — but for the rest of us, it takes the promise of something more, in the way of recognition and financial rewards, to get us to do our jobs.

Without trying to belabor the obvious, in our society superior achievement is rewarded with wealth and prestige. We do not know how Richard Cory earned money, but we can see in the poem what an inspiration he was to the people on the pavement.

In its purest form, wealth can motivate people to do their best work, until they ascend to that category we call “the rich.” The correlation between work and money is not pure; being who we are, humans tend to add moral implications to the equation, so that making money is more than a measure of work but also a measure of how good one is at heart.

To some degree, this explains why corporations also bestow benefits on chief executives — great benefits like cars, club memberships, vacations, and even homes. Companies consider these perks to be important because an executive who is living well will inspire junior executives to rise to his level by working hard. These fringe benefits convey approval and success in a way that cold hard cash does not. For example, after the first inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1981, Nancy Reagan replaced the tableware in the White House with $209,000 worth of Lennox china. To some, this seemed like egotistical waste of money, but it was intended as an inspirational message, to show “the people on the pavement” the extreme luxury that one can earn from working hard and rising to the top of one’s field.

Regardless of how economic theory justifies building one’s fortune, America has never been completely comfortable with limitless acquisition of wealth. This philosophy can be traced to the Puritans, a sect of English Protestants whose religious beliefs opposed luxury and welcomed hardship. A number of religious and philosophical orders settled in America during colonial times, but the Puritans were able to leave their mark on the way the culture developed because they survived. They accepted the difficulties of living in the strange wilderness without requiring worldly gratification or reward. For Puritans, work was itself a way of following God’s will, just as comfort was the devil’s way of luring men away from God. We still use the phrase “Puritan work ethic” today to describe that specifically American drive to keep working regardless of the reward, for the sake of work alone.

And so Americans have two opposing views of wealth. Economically, greed is good; it inspires people to work harder to buy more and then find ways to work even harder. Yet spiritually the belief is prevalent that the pursuit of material goods is a futile, empty endeavor that isolates people from what is really important. Ours is supposed to be classless society, dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal — but that basic principle is contradicted if wealthy people are considered better than ordinary people. To put it another way, we all want to be in Richard Cory’s place, but that does not keep us from thinking the worst of him.

Richard Cory’s suicide at the end of the poem seems natural, even if it does come as a shock, because the reader is prepared to believe that a wealthy man is hiding either shame or misery. One reason for this is that sometimes the rich are hiding something; it is naive to assume that the morals of the rich are better than anybody else’s.

Another reason the reader may be suspicious is that the rich have more resources and therefore have more places to hide their secrets, from secret walled-up rooms to undeveloped plots of land to Swiss bank accounts. A rich man may have paid people to be silent about what he has done. A poor man almost surely has not.

Finally, we accept that Richard Cory had something hidden all along because he just seemed too good to be true throughout the poem. If anyone can create a false impression, an educated, wealthy person can. Modern readers are just too sophisticated to rely on outward appearances, as the poem’s narrator apparently did, perhaps because he needed someone to look up to.

Wealth makes us suspicious and wealth makes us jealous, and when it comes to comparing ourselves

to someone who has more, we remind ourselves about the camel who can pass through the eye of a needle easier than a rich man can get into heaven. We have more rich people to look at today than Robinson did in his time. They serve the same basic intellectual and moral needs for us that they served when this poem was written. In Robinson’s day, the models of unrestrained wealth, such as Andrew Carnegie or Cornelius Vanderbilt or John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Mellon, were people who had built their astronomical fortunes from scratch, feeding both the hopes for personal growth and the fear of corruption that rich people are bound to stir up in common folk. There was a greater distance between wealthy people and average people.

Today we do not believe that the divide is that great. We believe that the person next door might win tonight’s lottery and be a millionaire in the morning. We believe that any one of our acquaintances who can read a teleprompter, walk a runway, chat amicably, or catch a ball — that is, just about anyone — might just be considered as talented as Carnegie or Vanderbilt and be showered with just as much money. We believe that the rich are more like us than Edwin Arlington Robinson believed, but we also have a more steady barrage of scandals, exposed by the same media culture that is producing these instant millionaires. Every day the newspapers and television remind us that rich people have secrets, that they are vulnerable to scandal.

The other thing that we like to believe about the rich is that those who do not have secrets are lonely, too far removed from “the real world” to really enjoy life. Alienation is a common cause of suicides, and it would certainly apply to Richard Cory; for all of the talk about him, he is kept at a distance, treated like an object, forced to live a role, different than the common people with no rich friend or even a complacent chauffeur to talk to.

In modern American life the image of the isolated billionaire is a steady fixture: the character of Charles Foster Kane in the movie Citizen Kane dies wealthy but friendless; and in real life, Howard Hughes was unbelievably rich but so phobic about germs that he sealed himself off in a disinfected room and died, in 1976, like a hermit. Common sense implies that the very wealthy would have countless friends, but those “friends” are more likely to be attracted by money and therefore not true friends at all. Believing that it is lonely at the top makes life more bearable to those who do not think they will ever get there anyway.

It is an American tradition to want to be rich, but at the same time to wish the rich person unhappiness. The converse of this is, of course, the tradition of the rich person to not care who thinks ill of him or her. In Richard Cory’s death, there is a kind of justification for the rest of us, the people on the pavement, the ones who are waiting for the light — we can rest assured that money does not buy happiness after all.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• The connection between Robinson’s poems about Tilbury Town, including Richard Cory, and the poems of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, published in 1915, has frequently been noted — both poem sequences provide a view of small-town America.
• Reviewers often compare Robinson to Henry James, a novelist who also explored the American attitude toward wealth. The Dial Press collection from 1944, The Great Short Novels of Henry James, includes the classics Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, and more.
• All of Robinson’s poems, including “Richard Cory,” are gathered in The Collected Poems Of Edwin Arlington Robinson, published in 1937.
• Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio (1919), tells the stories of citizens in a small town in Ohio.
• A great but often-neglected novel, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion also explores human the inner lives of privileged people. The character Richard Cory would fit comfortably into this novel.