Ralph Waldo Emerson was a great essayist. I like reading about Emerson. He was very interesting. His essay “Self Reliance” told me that I could be an individual, a non-conformest. Many people were influenced by him, including Henry David Thoreau, a neighbor in Concord. Mr. Thoreau wrote the famous book Walden, which details his experiences living alone in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts. Walt Whitman was influenced by Emerson. Eleven years before he published his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, he had read Mr. Emerson’s essays. Whitman was influenced by his lecture “The American Scholar,” in which Emerson calls for a representative man of poetry to write about strictly American subjects. Mr. Whitman answered his call, producing a masterpiece, the American epic, Leaves of Grass. Because Whitman was an unknown poet at the time, he had to publish his work on his own. The first edition does not even list his name as author. There is simply a picture of a rakish, swaggering 36-year-old man wearing a hat and with one hand on his hip, looking cockily into the camera. Whitman, in this pose, was testifying that he was the new American poet Emerson was calling for.