SOURCE: “‘Comprehensive Criticism’: A Humanistic Discipline,” in Bucknell Review, Vol. 10, No. 4, May, 1962, pp. 313-21, 324-25.

In the following excerpt, Garvin elaborates on his earlier ideas about “Richard Cory” in the course of discussing a new method of criticism. Garvin stresses the importance of Robinson's choice of and attitude toward the poem's narrator.

In critical analyses of artists of the highest rank like Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe—and even of their major individual works—all the critical methods and all relevant objective, subjective, and cultural elements can, in principle, be fruitfully used. A practical critic, especially one doing comprehensive criticism, should be austere and discriminating in what he tries to make relevant, and he should remember how short-winded readers of criticism can be. In my attempt to animate some of these generalizations on relevance and comprehensive criticism, I shall therefore analyze Edwin Arlington Robinson's “Richard Cory” rather than a...