A Poet Amidst the Shadows of Lincoln’s Era Born into the refined atmosphere of Philadelphia in 1823, George Henry Boker was a man whose life unfolded against the grand and often turbulent tapestry of nineteenth-century America. The son of a prominent banker, Boker was raised in an environment of intellectual ease and cultural sophistication, a foundation that allowed his innate literary talents to flourish from a very young age. His early education, shaped by private schooling and later refined at Princeton University, instilled in him a profound devotion to the classics and the rhythmic bea…