Cassandra was the daughter of Priam of Troy, and Hecuba a priestess of Apollo. The god gave her the gift of prophecy, but later, offended by her, fated her never to be believed. She forecast what would happen if the Wooden Horse were let in the walls of Troy and was ignored.

This was the eventual downfall for Troy and the misunderstood Cassandra. Both paid a tremendous price. Afraid that her foretelling were making things worse, Priam hid Cassandra in a prison where she was guarded as a madwoman.

Cassandra's curse of disbelief by others came to a climax after her prophesy about the colossal wooden horse, given as a gift by the Greeks, contained enemy soldiers, her claim fell on deaf ears and Troy was sacked. Cassandra sought safety at the temple of Athena, but was captured and violated by the Locrian, Ajax, breaking one of the strongest commandments in ancient religion: the inviolable sanctuary of the temple. As the spoils of Troy were divided, Cassandra was given to Agamemnon. He wasted no time impregnating her with twins, Teledamus and Pelops, before finally returning with her to his homeland, Mycenae.

Upon their arrival at Mycenae Agamemnon 's wife Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, lay in wait with a murderous plan. Cassandra's life ended in a final storm of tragedy-- Agamemnon was murdered by his wife and her lover; Cassandra was killed by the jealous Clytemnestra; and the twins were slain by Aegisthus. Many writers have sought to express this tragedy through many vehicles and ideas. In Aeschylus' play, Agamemnon, Cassandra foresees her own death, yet her audience, the chorus, does not believe her. The curse of Apollo remains with Cassandra to the end. Edwin Arlington Robinson's(1869-1935) Casandra in dotc write up; Robinson uses the long measure as a vehicle to get his own story about her across to the reader. Each stanza consists of 4 lines each having 4 stresses and is typically used in shorter poems since the repetitive quatrains can quickly lose interest. Learning the discipline of writing in a metered form seems to tune a poet's ear. "If free verse is as easy to write as it is hard to read," Robinson remarked once, "I'm not surprised there's so much of it." Even before E.E. Cummings created the freer, more radical forms he's famously known for, began his career by composing his poetry using the simple verse. Robinson wrote according to classic forms in this manner as well, then in more complex forms and in the end he educated his ear to hear the rich sounds of English and built an enormous vocabulary before he gravitated toward blank verse which dominated his later epic poetry.

His Cassandra poem was published in 1916 in The Man against the Sky and in it Robinson condemns the human race with his Cassandra by totaling the human sin of trading self esteem and spiritual values for the material:

    "Your Dollar, Dove and Eagle make
    A Trinity that even you
    Rate higher than you rate yourselves;
    It pays, it flatters and it's new.
Her bitter complaint is met with the derisive laughter from the crowd, "None heeded, and few heard." The multitudes who pray to the new Trinity do so at their dire peril, Robinson admonishes an American society of early 1900's whom he considered to be belligerent or uneducated to these consequences.

With a critical eye he uses allegory as the cautionary voice and the dull measure as emphasis to the ignorability of his lecture. A post-modern dilemma of resistance toward society's politic view of both physical and human nature.

Sources

About Robinson's Poetry:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/

Cassandra and Her Impact on Greek Art and Culture:
http://apk.net/~fjk/cassandra.html

EA Robinson:www.du.edu/~dokonski/robin.html

Edwin Arlington Robinson's Post-Modern Attitude of Resistance Toward Nature :
http://www.baylor.edu/~Anne_Ford/fordprojects.html