What poem did Thoreau write in jail?
Thoreau was jailed on July 23 and 24, 1846, for refusing to pay his poll tax. There is no documentary evidence that he wrote a poem (or anything else) during the one night he spent in the Concord jail, and none of the poems he wrote that year relates to that experience. He does discuss his night in jail in his famous essay, “Resistance to Civil Government” (published in 1866 as “Civil Disobedience”) and mentions the fact that other prisoners had written verses, a circular of which his cellmate shows him. See Journal 2: 1842-1848, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 262-264.
