![]() Just because the foundations for that reality later proved illusory and projective doesn't mean they weren't temporarily meaningful. Moreover, to them (taking Robinson's enjambment in meaningful isolation), this refined, good-looking man was "everything." In other words, this alien other functioned as an intimate part of the town's shared or "objective" reality. In this case, the perception of the otherness of another mind is the precondition for an intersubjective formation-just not between Cory and the chorus.Īnd yet, for a while at least, the townspeople thought they knew Cory. The poem's corporate subjectivity is almost entirely constituted by thinking about another person: the wealthy, "glittering" Richard Cory. On one hand, Cory's actions demonstrate the profound limitations of empathy, the ability "to understand and appreciate another person's feelings experience" (OED Online 2019), but on the other hand, paradoxically, this alienation is also the pretext for consensus, for a shared experience and a collective bond. After all, the choral voice is multiple, and the speakers' perceptions, correct or not, are shared, harmonized into a first-person plural pronoun. Other minds cannot be known, understood, or even empathized with due to a psychological myopia and group consensus that, in this instance, tends to conflate personal with social identities and acts as a barrier to true intersubjective experience.īut the speaker's projections are not wholly one-sided. The poem's flatly delivered, skull-perforating punchline turns on its power to contradict visual appearances, to disrupt assumption, and especially to interrupt one-sided projections, revealing in the process the townspeople's utter ignorance of Cory or his intentions. Indeed, before Cory committed suicide, the speakers admit: "We thought that he was everything/To make us wish that we were in his place" (Robinson 1989, 10). Seeing Cory's wealth, gentlemanly deportment, and "human" affability, the townspeople express envy of his station and implicitly project stability and contentment onto someone who, much to their surprise, goes home "one calm summer night" to "put a bullet through his head" (Robinson 1989, 10). The poem records a series of assumptions made on the part of a tragic chorus peopled by the poor inhabitants of a small town, perceiving and speaking in aggregate. E dwin A rlington R obinson's popular poem "R ichard C ory" (1897) examines the world-warping pitfalls involved in knowing other minds.
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