Nathaniel Hawthorne 287In 1845 Thoreau decided to put to the test his
theory that a person need not depend on society for a
satisfying existence. He built a cabin at Walden Pond
on some property owned by Emerson and lived there
alone for two years. The best fruit of this period was
that extraordinary book Walden(1854). Superficially,
Waldenis the story of Thoreau’s experiment, mov-
ingly and beautifully written. It is also an acid indict-
ment of the social behavior of the average American,
an attack on unthinking conformity, on subordinating
one’s own judgment to that of the herd.
The most graphic illustration of Thoreau’s confi-
dence in his own values occurred while he was living
at Walden. At that time the Mexican War was raging.
Thoreau considered the war immoral because it
advanced the cause of slavery. To protest, he refused
to pay his Massachusetts poll tax. For this he was
arrested and lodged in jail, although only for one
night because an aunt promptly paid the tax for him.
His essay “Civil Disobedience,” explaining his view of
the proper relation between the individual and the
state, resulted from this experience. Like Emerson,
however, Thoreau refused to participate in practical
reform movements. “I love Henry,” one of his friends
said, “but I cannot like him; and as for taking his
arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an
elm tree.”
Emerson,The Concord Hymnat
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Edgar Allan Poe
The work of all the imaginative writers of the period
reveals romantic influences, and it is possibly an indica-
tion of the affinity of the romantic approach to
American conditions that a number of excellent writers
of poetry and fiction first appeared in the 1830s and
1840s. Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most remarkable,
seems almost a caricature of the romantic image of the
tortured genius. Poe was born in Boston in 1809, the
son of poor actors who died before he was three years
old. He was raised by a wealthy Virginian, John Allan.
Few persons as neurotic as Poe have been able to
produce first-rate work. In college he ran up debts of
$2,500 in less than a year and had to withdraw. He
won an appointment to West Point but was discharged
after a few months for disobedience and “gross neglect
of duty.” He was a lifelong alcoholic and an occasional
taker of drugs. He married a child of thirteen.
Poe was obsessed with death. Once he attempted
to poison himself; repeatedly he was down and out,
even to the verge of starvation. He was haunted by
melancholia and hallucinations. Yet he was an excel-
lent magazine editor, a penetrating critic, a poet of
unique if somewhat narrow talents, and a fine short
ReadtheDocument story writer. Although he died at age forty, he turned
out a large volume of serious, highly original work.
Poe responded strongly to the lure of romanti-
cism. His works abound with examples of wild imagi-
nation and fascination with mystery, fright, and the
occult. If he did not invent the detective story, he
perfected it; his tales “The Murders in the Rue
Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter” stressed the
thought processes of a clever detective in solving a
mystery by reasoning from evidence.
Although dissolute in his personal life, when Poe
touched pen to paper, he became a disciplined crafts-
man. The most fantastic passages in his works are the
result of careful, reasoned selection; not a word, he
believed, could be removed without damage to the
whole. And despite his rejection of most of the values
prized by middle-class America, Poe was widely read
in his own day. His poem “The Raven” won instanta-
neous popularity when it was published in 1845. Had
he been a little more stable, he might have made a
good living with his pen—but in that case he might
not have written as he did.Nathaniel Hawthorne
Another product of the prevailing romanticism was
Nathaniel Hawthorne, born in 1804 in Salem,
Massachusetts. When Hawthorne was a small child,An image of Edgar Allan Poe on a cigar box. In 1845, impoverished
and an alcoholic, Poe was living in the “greatest wretchedness.” His
young wife was dying of tuberculosis. That same year he wrote,
“The Raven,” a poem about an ill-omened bird that intrudes on a
young man’s grief over the death of his beloved. “Take thy beak
from out my heart,” the man screams. Quoth the raven—
famously—“Nevermore.”