EDGAR ALAN POE

On January 19, 1809, Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Poe's father
and mother, both professional actors, died before the poet was three years old, and
John and Frances Allan raised him as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan, a
prosperous tobacco exporter, sent Poe to the best boarding schools and later to the
University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After less than one year of
school, however, he was forced to leave the university when Allan refused to pay Poe's
gambling debts.

Poe returned briefly to Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated. In 1827,
he moved to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army. His first collection of
poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems, was published that year. In 1829, he published a
second collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. Neither volume
received significant critical or public attention. Following his Army service, Poe was
admitted to the United States Military Academy, but he was again forced to leave for
lack of financial support. He then moved into the home of his aunt Maria Clemm and
her daughter Virginia in Baltimore, Maryland.

Poe began to sell short stories to magazines at around this time, and, in 1835, he
became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where he moved
with his aunt and cousin Virginia. In 1836, he married Virginia, who was thirteen years
old at the time. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals
including the Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia
and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he
established himself as a poet, a short story writer, and an editor. He published some of
his best-known stories and poems, including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Tell-
Tale Heart," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Raven." After Virginia's death
from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe's lifelong struggle with depression and alcoholism
worsened. He returned briefly to Richmond in 1849 and then set out for an editing job
in Philadelphia. For unknown reasons, he stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, 1849, he
was found in a state of semi-consciousness. Poe died four days later of "acute
congestion of the brain." Evidence by medical practitioners who reopened the case has
shown that Poe may have been suffering from rabies.

Poe's work as an editor, a poet, and a critic had a profound impact on American and
international literature. His stories mark him as one of the originators of both horror and
detective fiction. Many anthologies credit him as the "architect" of the modern short
story. He was also one of the first critics to focus primarily on the effect of style and
structure in a literary work; as such, he has been seen as a forerunner to the "art for art's
sake" movement. French Symbolists such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud claimed him as a
literary precursor. Baudelaire spent nearly fourteen years translating Poe into French.
Today, Poe is remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure
in world literature.

Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)
Poems (1831)
The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)

Fiction
Berenice (1835)
Ligeia (1838)
The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1939)
 Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
The Black Cat (1843)
The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
The Purloined Letter (1845)
The Cask of Amontillado (1846)
The Oval Portrait (1850)
The Narrative of Arthut Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1850)

Eldorado
Edgar Allan Poe - 1809-1849

Gaily bedight,
   A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,   
   Had journeyed long,   
   Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

   But he grew old—

   This knight so bold—   
And o’er his heart a shadow—   
   Fell as he found
   No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

   And, as his strength   

   Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow—   
   ‘Shadow,’ said he,   
   ‘Where can it be—
This land of Eldorado?’

   ‘Over the Mountains

   Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,   
   Ride, boldly ride,’
   The shade replied,—
‘If you seek for Eldorado!’

ROBERT FROST
Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, where his father, William
Prescott Frost Jr., and his mother, Isabelle Moodie, had moved from Pennsylvania shortly
after marrying. After the death of his father from tuberculosis when Frost was eleven
years old, he moved with his mother and sister, Jeanie, who was two years younger, to
Lawrence, Massachusetts. He became interested in reading and writing poetry during his
high school years in Lawrence, enrolled at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New
Hampshire, in 1892, and later at Harvard University in Boston, though he never earned a
formal college degree.

Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher,
cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first published poem, "My Butterfly,"
appeared on November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaper The Independent.

In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, whom he'd shared valedictorian honors with
in high school and who was a major inspiration for his poetry until her death in 1938.
The couple moved to England in 1912, after they tried and failed at farming in New
Hampshire. It was abroad that Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary
British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in England,
Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote
and publish his work.

By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-
length collections, A Boy's Will (Henry Holt and Company, 1913) and North of
Boston (Henry Holt and Company, 1914), and his reputation was established. By the
1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—
including New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923), A Further Range (Henry
Holt and Company, 1936), Steeple Bush (Henry Holt and Company, 1947), and In the
Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)—his fame and honors, including four Pulitzer
Prizes, increased. Frost served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from
1958 to 1959. In 1962, he was presented the Congressional Gold Medal. 

Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England—
and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained
steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time—Frost is anything
but merely a regional poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on
universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it
is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to
which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.

In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poet Daniel Hoffman describes

Frost's early work as "the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say
out loud the sources of its own delight in the world," and comments on Frost's career as
the "American Bard": "He became a national celebrity, our nearly official poet laureate,
and a great performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular,
Mark Twain."

President John F. Kennedy, at whose inauguration Frost delivered a poem, said of the
poet, "He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which
Americans will forever gain joy and understanding." And famously, "He saw poetry as
the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance,
poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern,
poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts,
poetry cleanses.”

Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in
Boston on January 29, 1963.
 Selected Bibliography
 
Poetry
In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)
Hard Not to Be King (House of Books, 1951)
Steeple Bush (Henry Holt and Company, 1947)
Masque of Reason (Henry Holt and Company, 1945)
Come In, and Other Poems (Henry Holt and Company, 1943)
A Witness Tree (Henry Holt and Company, 1942)
A Further Range (Henry Holt and Company, 1936)
From Snow to Snow (Henry Holt and Company, 1936)
The Lone Striker (Knopf, 1933)
The Lovely Shall Be Choosers (Random House, 1929)
West-Running Brook (Henry Holt and Company, 1928)
New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923)
Mountain Interval (Henry Holt and Company, 1916)
A Boy's Will (Henry Holt and Company, 1915)
North of Boston (Henry Holt and Company, 1914)

BIRCHES
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

EMILY DICKINSON
Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She
attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Her
father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in
Congress for one term. Her brother, Austin, who attended law school and became an
attorney, lived next door with his wife, Susan Gilbert. Dickinson’s younger sister, Lavinia,
also lived at home, and she and Austin were intellectual companions for Dickinson
during her lifetime.
Dickinson's poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-
century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in
a Puritan New England town, which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative
approach to Christianity.

She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats.
Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt
Whitman by rumors of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the
distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice.
While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters
to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her
work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in
1886.

Upon her death, Dickinson's family discovered forty handbound volumes of nearly 1,800
poems, or "fascicles" as they are sometimes called. Dickinson assembled these booklets
by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to
be final versions of poems. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of
various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound
and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, who removed her
annotations. The current standard version of her poems replaces her dashes with an en-
dash, which is a closer typographical approximation to her intention. The original order
of the poems was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical
evidence of the paper itself to restore her intended order, relying on smudge marks,
needle punctures, and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics
have argued that there is a thematic unity in these small collections, rather than their
order being simply chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily
Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) is the only volume that keeps the order intact.

Selected Bibliography
Poetry
The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems (New Direction, 2013)
Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems (Little, Brown, 1962)
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown, 1960)
Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson (Harper & Brothers, 1945)
 Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown, 1935)
Further Poems of Emily Dickinson: Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia (Little,
Brown, 1929)
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown, 1924)
The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime (Little, Brown, 1914)
Poems: Third Series (Roberts Brothers, 1896)
Poems: Second Series (Roberts Brothers, 1892)
Poems (Roberts Brothers, 1890)

Prose
Emily Dickinson Face to Face: Unpublished Letters with Notes and
Reminiscences (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932)
Letters of Emily Dickinson (Roberts Brothers, 1894)

BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

Rudyard Kipling
1865–1936
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, to a British
family. When he was five years old, he was taken to England to begin his education,
where he suffered deep feelings of abandonment and confusion after living a pampered
lifestyle as a colonial. He returned to India at the age of seventeen to work as a
journalist and editor for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore. Kipling published his
first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties and Other Verses, in 1886 and his first
collection of stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, in 1888.
In the early 1890s some of his poems were published in William Ernest Henley's National
Observer and later collected in to Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), an immensely popular
collection which contained "Gunga Din" and "Mandalay." In 1892 Kipling married and
moved to Vermont, where he published the two Jungle Books and began work on Kim.
He returned to England with his family in 1896 and published another novel, Captains
Courageous. Kipling visited South Africa during the Boer War, editing a newspaper there
and writing the Just-So Stories. Kim, Kipling's most successful novel (and his last),
appeared in 1901. The Kipling family moved to Sussex permanently in 1902, and he
devoted the rest of his life to writing poetry and short stories, including his most famous
poem, "If—". He died on January 18, 1936; his ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey.

Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Barrack-Room Ballads (1892)
Departmental Ditties and Other Verses (1886)
The Five N ations (1903)

Auto/Biography
Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown (1937)

Fiction
Captains Courageous (1897)
Just-So Stories (1902)
Kim (1902)
Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)
Stalky & Co. (1899)
The Jungle Book (1894)
The Light That Failed (1891)
The Second Jungle Book (1895)

Poetry & Prose

 A Diversity of Creatures (1917)
Rewards and Fairies (1910)

IF BY RUDYARD KIPLING
(‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies)
If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Walt Whitman
1819–1892

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, on Long Island, New York. He
was the second son of Walter Whitman, a house-builder, and Louisa Van Velsor. In the
1820s and 1830s, the family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Long Island and
Brooklyn, where Whitman attended the Brooklyn public schools.

At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer’s trade and fell in love with the
written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the
works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing
district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of seventeen, he began his career as
teacher in the one-room schoolhouses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841,
when he turned to journalism as a full-time career.

He founded a weekly newspaper, The Long-Islander, and later edited a number of

Brooklyn and New York papers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In 1848, Whitman
left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent for three
months. After witnessing the auctions of enslaved individuals in New Orleans, he
returned to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848 and co-founded a “free soil” newspaper,
the Brooklyn Freeman, which he edited through the next fall. Whitman’s attitudes about
race have been described as “unstable and inconsistent.” He did not always side with
the abolitionists, yet he celebrated human dignity.

In Brooklyn, he continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished
Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition
of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He
published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman
released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-two poems, a letter
from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response.
During his lifetime, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing several more
editions of the book. Noted Whitman scholar, M. Jimmie Killingsworth writes that “the
‘merge,' as Whitman conceived it, is the tendency of the individual self to overcome
moral, psychological, and political boundaries. Thematically and poetically, the notion
dominates the three major poems of 1855: ‘I Sing the Body Electric,' ‘The Sleepers,' and
‘Song of Myself,' all of which were ‘merged’ in the first edition under the single title
Leaves of Grass but were demarcated by clear breaks in the text and the repetition of
the title.”

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a “purged” and “cleansed” life.
He worked as a freelance journalist and visited the wounded at New York City–area
hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D. C. in December 1862 to care for his
brother, who had been wounded in the war.

Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to

stay and work in the hospitals; he ended up staying in the city for eleven years. He took
a job as a clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior,
which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman
was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive. After Harlan fired him,
he went on to work in the attorney general's office.

In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. A few months later
he travelled to Camden, New Jersey, to visit his dying mother at his brother’s house. He
ended up staying with his brother until the 1882 publication of Leaves of Grass (James R.
Osgood), which brought him enough money to buy a home in Camden.

In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years working on
additions and revisions to his deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (David McKay, 1891–
 92) and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye My Fancy (David
McKay, 1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he
designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.

Along with Emily Dickinson, he is considered one of America’s most important poets.

Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Leaves of Grass (David McKay, 1891)
Good-Bye, My Fancy (David McKay, 1891)
Leaves of Grass (James R. Osgood, 1881)
Passage to India (J.S. Redfield, 1870)
Leaves of Grass (J.S. Redfield, 1870)
Leaves of Grass (William E. Chapin, 1867)
Drum Taps (William E. Chapin, 1865)
Sequel to Drum Taps (William E. Chapin, 1865)
Leaves of Grass (Thayer & Eldridge, 1860)
Leaves of Grass (Fowler & Wells, 1856)
Leaves of Grass (self-published, 1855)

Prose
Complete Prose Works (David McKay, 1892)
November Boughs (David McKay, 1888)
Memoranda During the War (self-published, 1875)
Democratic Vistas (David McKay, 1871)
Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate (New World, 1842)

O Captain! My Captain!
BY  WA LT WH IT MA N
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
                         But O heart! heart! heart!
                            O the bleeding drops of red,
                               Where on the deck my Captain lies,
                                  Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
                         Here Captain! dear father!
                            This arm beneath your head!
                               It is some dream that on the deck,
                                 You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
                         Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
                            But I with mournful tread,
                               Walk the deck my Captain lies,
                                  Fallen cold and dead.