There was a group of poets who concentrated mainly on domestic topics. Sometimes they are also called Fireside poets or Schoolroom poets as they were often anthologized and they were the main American poets taught at schools. The most influential being: William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell. Their poems were clear, accessible and comforting. They supported conservative values, were often sentimental and didactic and carried a moral message. The poems promoted common sense, piety and honesty. The poets opposed social injustice, yet with the exception of Whittier and Lowell, they did not address these issues in their poetry. They mainly concentrated on common, known things that would appeal to a wide audience. Their poetry was thus not original in themes but in its form. The fireside poets excelled in many poetic genres, such as ballads, idylls, meditations, and lyric poems. 

Walt Whitman was born on Long Island, New York. At the age of 11, he left school to go to work. He was mainly self-taught. His collection The Leaves of Grass that Whitman kept revising all his life. The poem's innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, democracy, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet's self was one with the poem, the universe, and the reader permanently marked the development of American poetry. More than any other American poet or writer, Whitman invented the myth of democratic America. 

 The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States is essentially the greatest poem. . . . Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses. Here is the hospitality which forever indicates heroes.... Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves (Whitman, Leaves, 5).

 “Song of Myself ” and the other poems included in Leaves of Grass were unusual for their use of free verse instead of conventional meter and end rhyme. They were breaking poetic conventions of rhyme, meter, and subject matter, and inspired many American modernist poets, such as Carl Sandburg, e. e. cummings, or Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was one of the most prolific and original American, even though only a few poems were published during her lifetime. She was born in Amherst,  Massachusetts, at a time of religious revivals. She never married, and for that time she led an unconventional life: she spent her whole life in her father’s house and dedicated all her free time to writing poetry. She was inspired by nature and the New England countryside.  

 Dickinson’s poetry was influenced by the British Metaphysical poets, 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. 

She wrote more than eighteen hundred poems, some of which she copied into homemade manuscript books which she called fascicles. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). 

Dickinson's terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman's. She never uses two words when one will do, and combines concrete things with abstract ideas in an almost proverbial, compressed style. 

Dickinson’s poems had many editions over the first half of the twentieth century, but not until 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson compiled The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, were they all printed together. Further research has challenged previous editors’ transcriptions and analyses of her writing. Most recently, Ralph Franklin edited The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), which was published in three volumes. 

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was born in Boston. After his parents died, he was adopted by Mr. Allan and moved to Virginia. He is classified as a Southern writer though most of his works are set in Europe. Yet he had considerable influence on Southern literature. His vision of poetry was formed by the critical works of British romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. „Poe sees the poet as a priest or shaman, using his arts to entice us into a rejection of her and now – even a kind of magician who is attempting in effect to enchant us, or simply trick us, into forgetting the laws of the ordinary world.“ (Gray, A History of American Literature, 120). 

His best-known poem is "The Raven" (1845). The haunted, sleepless narrator, who has been reading and mourning the death of his "lost Lenore" at midnight, is visited by a raven (a bird that eats dead flesh, hence a symbol of death) that perches above his door and ominously repeats the poem's famous refrain, "nevermore." 

Poe's combination of decadence and dark romanticism influenced the French poets Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valéry, and Arthur Rimbaud. Poe accurately described the underside of the American dream of the self-made man and showed the price of materialism and excessive competition -- loneliness, alienation, and images of death-in-life.