Edgar Allan Poe in Boston, Massachusetts

'EDGAR ALLAN POE

POET   STORYWRITER   CRITIC

BORN ON CARVER STREET JANUARY 19, 1809,

TO DAVID AND ELIZABETH (ELIZA) POE,

ACTORS AT THE BOSTON THEATRE.

IN 1827 PUBLISHED HIS FIRST BOOK,

TAMBERLAINE AND OTHER POEMS,

AT A SHOP ON THE CORNER OF WASHINGTON

AND STATE STREETS AND ENLISTED IN THE

U.S. ARMY AT FORT INDEPENDENCE,

BOSTON HARBOR. LECTURED IN BOSTON

OCTOBER 16, 1845, PUBLISHED "LANDOR'S COTTAGE,"

HIS LAST TALE, IN BOSTON'S

FLAG OF OUR UNION, JUNE 9, 1849.

DIED AT BALTIMORE OCTOBER 7, 1849.'

Wendell Phillips in Boston, Massachusetts

Wendell Phillips (1811-84) was a lawyer who ceased practising law after seeing abolitionist George Thompson almost being lynched for his views, and listening to William Lloyd Garrison: he became a committed abolitionist, joined and gave speeches for the American Anti-Slavery Society, and wrote newpaper articles for the cause. He consumed no products produced by the work of slaves.

Following the Civil War, he turned his attention to such social issues as women's rights, universal suffrage, and equal rights for Native Americans.

This statue was erected in the Public Garden in 1913.

Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts

Beacon Hill is a neighborhood in Boston north of the Public Garden and Boston Common, with the boundaries Storrow Drive to the west, Cambridge Street to the north, Beacon Street to the south, and Somerset Street to the east. Many notable literary figures have lived here, but unfortunately the dense foliage and the parked vehicles make it very difficult to take a decent photo. However, I managed a few.

This quotation on a mural in Charles Street, Beacon Hill, is from Robert Lowell's 'The Ruins of Time', which consists of two sonnets, and the tercet here is from the end of the second sonnet:

'O Rome! From all your palms, dominion, bronze
and beauty, what was firm has fled. What once
was fugitive maintains its permanence.'

This second sonnet is a version of 'A Roma sepultada en ruinas' by Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645), of which the second tercet is:

'¡Oh Roma!, en tu grandeza, en tu hermosura
huyó lo que era firme, y solamente
lo fugitivo permanece y dura.'

And this in turn is a Spanish translation of the fourth sonnet  of the 'Les Antiquités de Rome' sequence (1556) by Joachim du Bellay (c. 1522-60), of which the second tercet is:

'Reste de Rome. Ô mondaine inconstance !
Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit,
Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance.'

'From 1865 to 1893

THE HOME OF

FRANCIS PARKMAN

American Historian' 

As I've already mentioned Parkman in the Mount Auburn Cemetery post, I shall say nothing here. Except that it was impossible to photograph the house because the foliage rendered it almost invisible.

Henry David Thoreau once lived in an apartment at 4 Pinckney Street.

Irish-American Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920) was a poet and essayist born in Roxbury, MA, and was a friend of Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. Her most noted publications are A Roadside Harp (1893) and Patrins (1897). She died in Chipping Camden, England.

'20 Pinckney Street

As a litle girl Louisa May Alcott lived in rented rooms at 20 Pinckney Street. The Alcott home was part of the Boston literary scene during the decades before the Civil War.  Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott, was an innovative educator whose friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and William Lloyd Garrison.

In the 1880s, her reputation and fortune secure, Miss Alcott returned to Beacon Hill. She lived at 10 Louisberg Square until her death.'

'ROBERT LEE FROST

1874-1963

AMERICA'S "POET LAUREATE

AND FOUR-TIME PULITZER PRIZE WINNER

LIVED AT 88 MT. VERNON STREET

FROM 1938-1941

WHILE TEACHING POETRY

AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY

"THE FIGURE A POEM MAKES,

IT BEGINS IN DELIGHT AND ENDS IN WISDOM."'

Inman Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Inman Square is in Cambridge, but away from the center, and describes the area around the junction between Inman, Cambridge, and Hampshire Streets.

Ryle's is on Hampshire Street, and is mentioned several times in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, notably by this quotation:

'Ryle's Jazz Club's upscale pub-type bar, guys in tweed caps and briar pipes in mouths at angles taking all day on a pint of warm stout.'

There's another of these Bukowski Tavern dive bars (which are affectionately known as 'Buk's') in Boston, but this is on Cambridge Street and is everything you might expect with a name like this. Shame about the cars in the way, though.

Lorem Ipsum Books, also on Cambridge Street, has the right idea by telling people to read instead of watching TV.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Longfellow House was built in 1759 for John Vassall Jr, and used as General George Washington's headquarters during the siege of Boston (July 1775 to April 1776). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82) first rented two rooms here from Elizabeth Craigie when he was appointed Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard. In 1843, on Longfellow's marriage to Fanny Appleton, his father-in-law Nathan Appleton bought Craigie House as a wedding present.

Visitors to the house were many, including Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickens, Trollope, and Julia Ward Howe.

Longfellow had the carriage house built in 1844. It is now used for public lectures and workshops, and education programs.

The entrance to  the garden, and also to the visitor center.

 

The Longfellow Memorial in Longfellow Park, which stretches from Brattle Street to Mount Auburn Street near the Charles River. Daniel Chester French completed this memorial in 1914: the bronze bust of Longfellow stands in the center, with six characters from his poems behind in relief:

Miles Standish from 'The Courtship of Miles Standish' (1858).

The angel Sandalphon from 'Birds of Passaage' (1858).

The blacksmith from 'The Village Blacksmith' (1841).

The Spanish student from The Spanish Student: A Play in Three Acts (1843).

Evangeline from Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847).

Hiawatha from The Song of Hiawatha (1855).

Authors' Houses: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Alcotts in Concord, Massachusetts

The Old Manse on Monument Street, Concord, was built by Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandfather, Rev. William Emerson, in 1770. William's widow married Rev. Ezra Ripley, and Emerson stayed with his ageing step-grandfather at the Old Manse in 1834, where he wrote a draft of Nature, (1836), which set the foundations for transcendentalism.

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody and moved to the Old Manse, which was not in fact named 'The Old Manse' until Hawthorne  came along, and was where Thoreau had prepared the garden for the pair to move in.

Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse (1846).

Originally named 'Coolidge Castle' after the family that owned it from its construction in 1828, Ralph Waldo Emerson bought this house, at the junction of the Cambridge Turnpike and Lexington Road, in 1835: the tragic death of his wife Ellen at the age of twenty had left him wealthy, and after a period of turmoil (in which he left both the church and academia), he visited Europe and returned to New England with many new ideas, and to Concord in particular with a new wife - Lydia (he preferred 'Lidian'), née Jackson.

A number of notable people visited Emerson in this house, and a few stayed here for a short time - significantly Henry Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.

The utopian Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), the founder of the unfortunate Temple School in Boston and the father of Louisa May Alcott, moved to Concord. Aided by the ever-generous Emerson, the Alcotts purchased 'Hillside' in 1845, although Bronson's wife Abigail (usually called Abby) was unhappy with the move, and the family rented the home out and moved on in 1848.

In 1852, the Hawthornes moved back to Concord and purchased the house, renaming it 'The Wayside'. 

Harriett Mulford Stone Lothrop - mentioned in my Sleepy Hollow Cemetery post as the writer of the Five Little Peppers children's stories as 'Margaret Sidney' - and her daughter Margaret preserved The Wayside.

The Alcotts returned to Concord and bought Orchard House, next door to 'Wayside' (or 'Hillside' as Bronson still insisted in calling it) in 1857.  Louisa wrote Little Women here.

The Concord School of Philosophy is at the side of the house and was run by Bronson from 1880 until a short while before his death.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts

Most of the noted Concord writers are buried on Authors' Ridge, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, MA, which is about a half mile north out of downtown Concord on the west side of Bedford Road, and no doubt the highest area of the cemetery. Very unusual it must be to find such of cluster of famous people all in one spot. 

The Thoreau plot contains - along with Henry David Thoreau - the remains of Henry David Thoreau's pencil maker father John Thoreau (1787-1858), his wife Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau (1787-1872), his brother John Thoreau Jr (1816-42), and his younger sister Sophia E. Thoreau (1819-76).

It's not difficult to spot the grave of the most noted Thoreau.

And right opposite is the grave of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Hawthorne plot.

'SOPHIA

WIFE OF

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

BORN IN SALEM MASSACHUSETTS

DIED IN LONDON

JANUARY TWENTY-FIRST 1871

BURIED IN KENSAL GREEN

REINTERRED HERE JUNE 2006'

Emerson's huge slab of granite.

'RALPH WALDO

EMERSON

BORN IN BOSTON MAY 1803

DIED IN CONCORD APRIL 27 1882

THE PASSIVE MASTER LENT HIS HAND

TO THE VAST SOUL THAT O'ER HIM PLANNED'

The above two-line quotation is from Emerson's poem 'The Problem'.

'LIDIAN

Wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Wife of Charles & Lucy (Cotton) Jackson.

Born on 20th September 1802, close by

Plymouth Rock, as she loved to remember.

Died November 30th 1892 in Concord.'

Emerson's second wife (see post above).

'HARRIETT MILFORD STONE LOTHROP

MARGARET SIDNEY

THE CREATOR OF THE FIVE LITTLE PEPPERS

ALWAYS A LOVER OF AND WORKER FOR CHILDREN'

Lothrop (1844-1924) - as 'Margaret Sidney' (see the post above) - wrote children's stories.

As this marker states, Lothrop was the founder of the Children of the American Revolution. Had the marker not been there, it would have been difficult to find the grave.

The Alcott family plot.

Louisa May Alcott.

Edmund Hosmer (1798-1881) was a Concord farmer who was a friend of Emerson and Thoreau who was associated with the Transcendentalists and had helped Thoreau in the construction of his cabin.

'EPHRIAM WALES BULL

THE ORIGINATOR OF THE CONCORD GRAPE

BORN IN BOSTON MAR 4 1806

DIED IN CONCORD SEPT 26 1806

HE SOWED OTHERS REAPED'

Presumably the final line refers to the fact that Bull, a neighbor of Bronson Alcott's - thanks to Thomas Jefferson -  was unable to patent his invention, so lost out big time. The story of this is in an essay in Paul Collins's Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck (London: Picador, 2001).

'ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

1804-1894

A TEACHER OF THREE GENERATIONS OF CHILDREN,

AND THE FOUNDER OF KINDERGARTEN IN AMERICA.

EVERY HUMAN CAUSE HAD HER SYMPATHY.

AND MANY HER ACTIVE AID.'

Sophia Hawthorne's sister is buried far from Authors' Ridge.