oblivion wrote:he "fluttered pulses" and "glittered when he walked".....fantastic, isn't it?

And "quietly arrayed" and "imperially slim"--good stuff.

The irony reveals a discrepancy between what appears to be true and what is actually true. This is from the townspeople's viewpoint. "We people on the pavement looked at him." And they see only Richard Cory's positive traits, his good looks, high manners, and knowledge that he is rich. They imagine he is happy and they would be happy if they could be like him. But in the very last line we discover that Richard Cory was in fact desperately unhappy. It baffles our expectations.

I do love Paul Simon's version in which the last chorus--I wish I could be like Richard Cory--is sung even after we find out that Richard Cory killed himself. Does he still wish he was like Richard Cory?

I'm not very experienced in poetry, but for me this anthology was a good start. There's a plethora of content to work with, a lot of prose and structure to comprehend, and going through the entire volume was generally a satisfying experience for an unaffiliated person such as myself. However, this being an anthology, more specifically being limited to 500 poems, there will probably the inevitable lists of poems that were been left out, and the entire volume may be left uneven because of some of...more

viajesen1 wrote:I'm not very experienced in poetry, but for me this anthology was a good start. There's a plethora of content to work with, a lot of prose and structure to comprehend, and going through the entire volume was generally a satisfying experience for an unaffiliated person such as myself. However, this being an anthology, more specifically being limited to 500 poems, there will probably the inevitable lists of poems that were been left out, and the entire volume may be left uneven because of some of...more

If you managed to read all of these poems independently, I'm impressed. It was the group effort that got the rest of us through. Not that it's in any way a painful exercise, but it's just the discipline of sticking to it that some, such as I, find is in short supply. We did have many discussions about some blankety-blank poem that never should have made anyone's top 500 list. The method of selection the editor used was supposed to be somewhat scientific, not based on his own opinions but those of countless previous anthologizers.

I can't remember getting so angry at something so trivial. When a poem appeared that seemed opaque to me....I got really cross.

I sulked....in fact.