Edgar Allan Poe
Born January 19, 1809, Boston,
Massachusetts, U.S. American
short-story writer, poet, critic, and
editor Edgar Allan Poe's tales of
mystery and horror initiated the
modern detective story, and the
atmosphere in his tales of horror is
unrivaled in American fiction.
His The Raven (1845) numbers
among the best-known poems in
national literature.
Edgar Allan Poe
Walt Whitman
Poet and journalist Walt Whitman
was born May 31, 1819 in West
Hills, New York. Considered one of
America's most influential poets,
Whitman aimed to transcend
traditional epics, eschew normal
aesthetic form, and reflect the
nature of the American experience
and its democracy. In 1855 he selfpublished the collection “Leaves of
Grass”, now a landmark in
American literature.
Leaves of Grass
The smoke of my own breath;
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine;
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart,
the passing of blood and air through my lungs;
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-color’d
sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn;
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice,
words loos’d to the eddies of the wind;
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms;
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag;
The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides;
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and
meeting the sun.
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was born on July
12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. He
began writing nature poetry in the 1840s,
with poet Ralph Waldo Emerson as a
mentor and friend. In 1845 he began his
famous two-year stay on Walden Pond,
which he wrote about in his master work,
Walden. He also became known for his
beliefs in Transcendentalism and civil
disobedience, and was a dedicated
abolitionist.
Transcendentalism
a philosophy which says that thought and
spiritual things are more real than ordinary
human experience and material things
Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience
In July of 1846, while on his way to Concord to
run an errand, Henry David Thoreau was
arrested by the local sheriff for failure to pay a
poll tax. Thoreau, who believed this poll tax
supported the Mexican-American war and the
expansion of slavery into the Southwest, had
stopped paying this tax in 1842 but the sheriff,
Sam Staples, failed to take action against him for
several years.
According to the book “A Historical Guide to
Henry David Thoreau,” the poll tax actually had
nothing to do with the Mexican-American war
and Thoreau’s arrest was technically illegal.