Donaldson, who has written biographies of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish and John Cheever, sets out to rescue Robinson from his detractors and his admirers alike.Īt the time of his death in 1935, Robinson was the nation’s pre-eminent poet. That’s Donaldson’s tactful way of saying Simon padded Robinson’s poem to thicken the irony and heighten its palatability for a pop audience. When Paul Simon rewrote the poem for his 1960s song, he decided to give Robinson’s shadowy character greater definition.
Robinson furnishes no concrete information about his occupation or family.
“The character of Richard Cory is sketched impressionistically in the poem. In his loving reclamation of Robinson’s literary reputation, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life, Scott Donaldson addresses Simon’s rewrite of Robinson’s poem: Henry, and I was wrong about “Richard Cory.” It also left me with the unearned conviction that Robinson was a hack, a sort of O. Like many readers of a certain age, I first learned of Edwin Arlington Robinson not in the classroom, but by way of Simon and Garfunkel.Ī solemnly earnest arrangement of his “greatest hit” from 1897, “Richard Cory,” appeared on “Sounds of Silence, the duo’s 1966 album, and the melodrama of the final lines impressed my adolescent sensibility.
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