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

Edgar Allan Poe

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 self-published the collection “Leaves of

Grass”, now a landmark in American literature.

Walt Whitman

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.

Leaves of Grass

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.

Henry David Thoreau

Transcendentalism a philosophy which says that thought and

spiritual things are more real than ordinary human experience and material things

Henry David Thoreau

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.

Civil Disobedience