Time marches on, new things are introduced over the years to the masses, things that forever change the course of history. Literature has always been one of the prominent foundations of our society, sometimes so strongly that when a movement and drastic idea comes along to question how structure has always been, the idea sticks and thus, we have the literature of today. During the course of America’s formation, one such movement brought about feelings and ideas so intense, so eclectic, that it made a society become a “thinking” one, and became the birth of a timeless piece of work that has risen questions as to the motivations and origins found within its words. Romanticism, by definition, was a literary movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth century that marked the reaction of in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics from neoclassicism. People were becoming more free thinkers, their writings taking on the “romantic” tone. In aspect, writing, such as poetry, held more soul and emotion, speaking directly from the author’s heart, and in a sense, Romanticism was a literary movement of the mind, heart, and soul. The American Romanticism, or American Renaissance as it was often labeled, took place, beginning in 1825 and ending around 1865, at the closing of the Civil War (Holman). The most formidable years were 1850-1855, in which some of America’s most famous literary pieces such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden were produced, introducing the American citizen to stories and poems that spoke of political independence and uprisings against the status quo that had been set amongst the people for almost 200 years (Intro to Am. Renaissance). Copyright, the process of having your work protected by laws from the reproduction without permission of the author, was created and came into play more often to prevent the illegal reproduction