The Great Boston Fire of November 1872 destroyed sixty-five acres of the city centre, generating $73 million in property losses and revealing that many insurers had dangerously underestimated urban risk concentrations and loss accumulations.

Boston was the heart of the American literary establishment — home to Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and the Atlantic Monthly; the fire's destruction of the commercial core of American letters' hub concentrated anxieties about civilisation, loss, and rebuilding that were deeply felt in post-Civil War American poetry.