Read the passage below carefully. Select the phrases that explain why someone might practice civil disobedience. Writers such as Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau stressed the relationship between humans and nature and the importance of the individual conscience. This literary movement was known as Transcendentalism. In his works, Emerson urged people to listen to the inner voice of conscience and to overcome prejudice. Thoreau practiced civil disobedience—refusal to obey laws he found unjust. For example, Thoreau went to jail in 1846 rather than pay a tax to support the Mexican American War.

In poetry, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote narrative, or story, poems such as the Song of Hiawatha. Walt Whitman captured the new American spirit and confidence in his Leaves of Grass. Emily Dickinson wrote hundreds of simple, deeply personal poems, many of which celebrated the natural world.
—Discovering Our Past: A History of the United States