Edwin Arlington Robinson

It is the classic line that it repeated over and over again, "You Can't Judge a Book by It's Cover." In Richard Corey, the young man is admired by the younger boys and seen with envy by the others. Judging by his actions, the man was depressed, but no one ever saw his emotions underneath his well dressed body and wealthy fingers. As a piece of Realism literature, the poem documents a specific event. It includes emotion as most realism pieces do. It isn't odd to find the author including their own opinions in realism works, and the English book points out that Edwin Arlington Robinson often had emotional characters in his literature. This somewhat biased writing wasn't new to realism authors. In the Transcendentalist period in literature, author such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau stated their views on issues in their writings. It wasn't necessarily common for writers to give such strong views, especially if they were aimed negatively at another group, such as the government. The protests that Emerson and Thoreau sent using their words opened doors and acted as influence to the writers of literary periods to come.