"Miniver Cheevy" is a narrative poem written by Edwin Arlington Robinson, published in The Town down the River in 1910.[1] The poem (written in quatrains of iambic tetrameter for three lines, followed by a catalectic line of only three iambs), relates the story of a hopeless romantic who spends his days thinking about what might have been if only he had been born in a nobler and more romantic era.
Some scholars suggest that the character of Miniver is meant to be Robinson's self-aware skewering of his own sense of being an anachronism or throwback, but others add that Miniver represents a critique of the general culture of Robinson's time.[2] Regardless, the character portrait is similar to Robinson's Richard Cory, a deeply discontented individual unable to fit in with society and bent on self-destruction.[3] Robinson's preoccupation with such characters is one of the reasons he was called "America's poet laureate of unhappiness."[4]