This volume contains selected works from several poets that are available in the public domain. All the poets have some connection to the city of Baltimore, Maryland, which was the primary reason for thieeir inclusion. The most famous of these poets are, of course, Edgar Allan Poe, who is, perhaps most famous for his macabre wrtings, but whose poetry is still valued today, Emily Dickinson, who is still studied in nearly all college English programs, Francis Scott Key, who wrote the Star-Spangled Banner and was a well-known poet at the time, and Ogden Nash, whose poetry is often unfairly described as doggeral. Much of their work is still influential.
The work of three other, lesser-known poets with a Baltimore connection are also included in this volume: Sidney Lanier, James Ryder Randall, and Lizette Woodworth Reese.
Randall is, perhaps, the best known of these three, having written the poem "Maryland My Maryland," which is now the official Maryland State Song. This is jarring to the ears of today's listener, since the poem, and hence the song, glorify violence in the resistance of the Confederacy to the United States during the Civil War.
About the editor/compiler of this volume:
Ronald J. Leach recently retired as Professor and Chair Emeritus from the Department of Systems and Computer Science at Howard University, where he had taught since 1969. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland at College Park and the M. S. degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include distributed systems, performance modeling and capacity planning; and most areas of software engineering, especially software reuse, fault-tolerance, and software performance measurement and their empirical foundations. Some of his current work includes the application of computing to the social sciences, especially in the area of name matching within historical documents, using both his computer search skills and genealogical knowledge. He is an experienced cruise ship lecturer, with special emphasis on identity theft and computer forensics. He also lectures to other groups.
Ron Leach is the author of seven print books: "Using C in Software Design," Academic Press Professional,"Advanced Topics in UNIX," John Wiley; "Object-Oriented Design and Programming in C++," Academic Press Professional, Software Reuse: Methods, Models, and Costs," McGraw-Hill, "Introduction to Software Engineering," CRC Press, "Genealogy for the Information Age," Disruptive Publishing, and "Relative Genealogy," Disruptive Publishing. He has published two books on the subject of identity theft: "Twelve and a Half Steps to Avoid Identity Theft," as an ebook, and "Identity Theft in the Cyber Age," which is available as both an ebook and in print. Revised editions of many of these are available as ebooks.
Dr. Leach has offered technical training and seminars on software reuse, reengineering, and testing on three continents. He has lectured on a variety of other topics between continents! He is also the author or co-author of more than one hundred technical papers. In his spare time, he is the co-Editor of the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal and is webmaster for its newly designed website.
