A Poet Turned Nurse
Born in New York on May 31st, 1819, Walt Whitman was the second of nine children. His family was poor and he had no real schooling. He loved to read and write and studied many classics on his own. At age 12, he began a trade in printing and started writing poems. He held many jobs over the years and one was editor for a newspaper down in New Orleans called The New Orleans...
Colonel Edmund Lilly Jr. sat in camp Tarlac in the northern Philippines. He, along with his unit, had surrendered to the Japanese in April and had been subjected to the Bataan death march which saw many prisoners expire from horrid conditions. Edmund then decided that the best way to live out his captivity was to keep a diary to both record his experiences and give him something to occupy his time....
Edgar Allan Poe spent his final months in poverty, tormented by grief, drowning his depression in alcohol and poetry. In May 1849, in his small New York cottage, he wrote what was to be his last completed poem, “Annabel Lee,” in which he returned to the themes that had haunted him for much of his life. The poem, set long ago in a kingdom by the sea, describes the speaker’s undying love for the...