Leaves of Grass: First and Death-Bed Editions

by Walt Whitman

  —from The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication (1866)

  JOHN BURROUGHS

  When Leaves of Grass was written and published, the author was engaged in putting up small frame houses in the suburbs of Brooklyn, partly with his own hands and partly with hired help. The book was still-born. To a small job printing office in that city belongs the honor, if such, of bringing it to light. Some three score copies were deposited in a neighboring book store, and as many more in another book store in New York. Weeks elapsed and not one was sold. Presently there issued requests from both the stores that the thin quarto, for such it was, should be forthwith removed. The copies found refuge in a well-known phrenological publishing house in Broadway, whose proprietors advertised it and sent specimen copies to the journals and to some distinguished persons. The journals remained silent, and several of the volumes sent to the distinguished persons were returned with ironical and insulting notes. The only attention the book received was, for instance, the use of it by the collected attaches of a leading daily paper of New York, when at leisure, as a butt and burlesque—its perusal aloud by one of the party being equivalent to peals of ironical laughter from the rest.

  A small but important occurrence seems to have turned the tide. This was the appearance of a letter from the most illustrious literary man in America, brief, but containing a magnificent eulogium of the book. A demand arose, and before many months all the copies of the thin quarto were sold. At the present date, a curious person, poring over the shelves of second-hand book stalls in side places of the city, may light upon a copy of this quarto, for which the stall-keeper will ask him treble its first price. Leaves of Grass, considerably added to, and printed in the new shape of a handy 16mo. of about 350 pages, again appeared in 1857. This edition also sold. The newspaper notices of it both here and in Great Britain were numerous, and nearly all of them scoffing, bitter and con demnatory. The most general charge made was that it had passages of serious indelicacy....

  The full history of the book, if it could ever be written, would be a very curious one. No American work has ever before excited at once such diametrically opposite judgments, some seeing in it only matter for ridicule and contempt; others, eminent in the walks of literature, regarding it as a great American poem. Its most enthusiastic champions are young men, and students and lovers of nature; though the most pertinent and suggestive criticism of it we have ever seen, and one that accepted it as a whole, was by a lady—one whose name stands high on the list of our poets. Some of the poet’s warmest personal friends, also, are women of this mould. On the other hand, the most bitter and vindictive critic of him of whom we have heard was a Catholic priest, who evoked no very mild degree of damnation upon his soul; if, indeed, we except the priestly official at the seat of government who, in administering the affairs of his department, on what he had the complacency to call Christian principles, took occasion, for reason of the poet’s literary heresies alone, to expel him from a position in his office. Of much more weight than the opinion of either of these Christian gentlemen is the admiration of that Union soldier we chanced to hear of, who by accident came into possession of the book, and without any previous knowledge of it or its author, and by the aid of his mother wit alone, came to regard it with feelings akin to those which personal friendship and intercourse alone awaken; carrying it in his knapsack through three years of campaigning on the Potomac, and guarding it with a sort of jealous affection from the hands of his comrades.

  -from Galaxy (December 1, 1866)

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  [Whitman‘s] book, he tells us, should be read “among the cooling influences of external nature”; and this recommendation, like that other famous one which Hawthorne prefixed to his collected tales, is in itself a character of the work. Every one who has been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with the body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true ease and quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we think in a plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem big enough, and great things no longer portentous; and the world is smilingly accepted as it is. This is the spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades. He thinks very ill of the atmosphere of parlours or libraries. Wisdom keeps school outdoors. And he has the art to recommend this attitude of mind by simply pluming himself upon it as a virtue; so that the reader, to keep the advantage over his author which most readers enjoy, is tricked into professing the same view. And this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, is the greatest charm of his work. Thence, in spite of an uneven and emphatic key of expression, something trenchant and straightforward, something simple and surprising, distinguishes his poems. He has sayings that come home to one like the Bible. We fall upon Whitman, after the works of so many men who write better, with a sense of relief from strain, with a sense of touching nature, as when one passes out of the flaring, noisy thoroughfares of a great city into what he himself has called, with unexcelled imaginative justice of language, “the huge and thoughtful night.” And his book in consequence, whatever may be the final judgment of its merit, whatever may be its influence on the future, should be in the hands of all parents and guardians as a specific for the distressing malady of being seventeen years old. Green-sickness yields to his treatment as to a charm of magic; and the youth, after a short course of reading, ceases to carry the universe upon his shoulders.

  -from Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882)

  WILLIAM JAMES

  Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good.

  Thus it has come about that many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist. Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are already beginning to be drawn; hymns are written by others in his peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter.

  -from The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

  EZRA POUND

  His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America. He is the hollow place in the rock that echoes with his time. He does ‘chant the crucial stage’ and he is the ’voice triumphant.‘ He is disgusting. He is an exceedingly nauseating pill, but he accomplishes his mission.

  -from “What I Feel About Walt Whitman” (1909), in

  Selected Prose: 1909—1965 (1973)

  D. H. LAWRENCE

  Whitman was the first to break the mental allegiance. He was the first to smash the old moral conception, that the soul of man is something “superior” and “above” the flesh. Even Emerson still maintained this tiresome “superiority” of the soul. Even Melville could not get over it. Whitman was the first heroic seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck and plant her down among the potsherds.

  -from Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

  LANGSTON HUGHES

  Walt Whitman wrote without the frills, furbelows, and decorations of conventional poetry, usually without rhyme or measured pretti ness. Perhaps because of his simplicity, timid poetry lovers over the years have been frightened away from his Leaves of Grass, poems as firmly rooted and as brightly growing as the grass itself. Perhaps, too, because his all-embracing words lock arms with workers and farmers, Negroes and whites, Asiatics and Europeans, serfs and freemen, beaming democracy to all, many academic-minded intellectual isolationists in America have little use for Whitman, and so have impeded his
handclasp with today by keeping him imprisoned in silence on library shelves. Still his words leap from their pages and their spirit grows steadily stronger everywhere.

  —“The Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman,” in

  I Hear the People Singing: Selected Poems of Walt Whitman (1946)

  ALLEN GINSBERG

  Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.

  Which way does your beard point tonight?

  (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the

  supermarket and feel absurd.)

  Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade

  to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.

  Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past

  blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

  Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,

  what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry

  and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching

  the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

  from “A Supermarket in California” (1955)

  PABLO NERUDA

  There are many kinds of greatness, but let me say (though I be a poet of the Spanish tongue) that Walt Whitman has taught me more than Spain’s Cervantes: in Walt Whitman’s work one never finds the ignorant being humbled, nor is the human condition ever found offended.

  We continue to live in a Whitmanesque age, seeing how new men and new societies rise and grow, despite their birth-pangs. Walt Whitman was the protagonist of a truly geographical personality: the first man in history to speak with a truly continental American voice, to bear a truly American name.

  -from “We Live in a Whitmanesque Age” in

  the New York Times (April 14, 1972)

  ALICIA OSTRIKER

  But what moves me, and I suspect other American women poets, is less the agreeable programmatic utterances than the gestures whereby Whitman enacts the crossing of gender categories in his own person. It is not his claim to be “of the woman” that speeds us on our way but his capacity to be shamelessly receptive as well as active, to be expansive on an epic scale without a shred of nostalgia for narratives of conquest, to invent a rhetoric of power without authority, without hierarchy, and without violence. The omnivorous empathy of his imagination wants to incorporate All and therefore refuses to represent anything as unavailably Other. So long as femaleness in our culture signifies Otherness, Whitman’s greed is our gain.

  —from “Loving Walt Whitman and the Problem of America,” in

  The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman (1992)

  QUESTIONS

  1. Why do you think Whitman is so often thought of as prototypically American? Is it because of his inclusiveness? His “barbaric yawp,” as he called it? His refusal to adhere to traditional forms? His optimism?

  2. In 1882 the district attorney of Boston, Oliver Stevens, sent publisher James R. Osgood an order to stop publication of Leaves of Grass on the grounds that it violated “the Public Statutes concerning obscene literature.” Do you see any lines in Leaves as obscene or, in any case, as an outrage to public decency? You may want to examine closely the poems Osgood wanted Whitman to remove or change, such as “A Woman Waits for Me,” “Spontaneous Me,” and “The Dalliance of the Eagles.”

  3. How would you formulate Whitman’s spirituality? Is it Christian? Just a loose religiosity? A body mystique? A version of an Asian religion, such as Buddhism?

  4. Whitman maintained strong sympathies for women’s rights activists, such as Abby Price and Frances Wright. But D. H. Lawrence criticized Whitman’s descriptions of women—“athletic mothers of the states... depressing. Muscle and wombs—functional creatures—no more.” What is your own take on Whitman’s treatment of women?

  FOR FURTHER READING

  WHITMAN: WRITINGS AND CONVERSATIONS

  The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman. Edited by Richard Maurice Bucke, Thomas B. Harned, and Horace L. Traubel. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902.

  The Correspondence. 5 vols. Edited by Edwin Haviland Miller. New York: New York University Press, 1961—1969.

  Daybooks and Notebooks. 3 vols. Edited by William White. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

  The Early Poems and the Fiction. Edited by Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York University Press, 1963.

  Faint Clews and Indirections: Manuscripts of Walt Whitman and His Family. Edited by Clarence Gohdes and Rollo G. Silver. New York: AMS Press, 1965.

  The Gathering of the Forces. 2 vols. Edited by Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920.

  I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times. Edited by Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz. New York: Columbia University Press, 1932.

  The Journalism. Edited by Herbert Bergman, Douglas A. Noverr, and Edward J. Recchia. 2 vols. New York: Peter Lang, 1998, 2003.

  Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems. 3 vols. Edited by Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White. New York: New York University Press, 1980.

  New York Dissected: A Sheaf of Recently Discovered Newspaper Articles by the Author of Leaves of Grass. Edited by Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari. New York: R. R. Wilson, 1936.

  Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. 6 vols. Edited by Edward F. Grier. New York: New York University Press, 1984. New York: New York University Press, 1961.

  Notes and Fragments. Edited by Richard Maurice Bucke. Ontario, Canada: A. Talbot, 1899.

  Specimen Days and Collect. 1882. New York: Dover, 1995.

  Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. 2 vols. Edited by Emory Holloway. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1972.

  Walt Whitman and the Civil War: A Collection of Original Articles and Manuscripts. Edited by Charles I. Glicksberg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1933.

  The Walt Whitman Archive: A Facsimile of the Poet’s Manuscripts. 6 vols. Edited by Joel Myerson. New York: Garland, 1993.

  Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora. Edited by Joseph Jay Rubin and Charles H. Brown. State College, PA: Bald Eagle Press, 1950.

  Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855-1892. Edited by Gary Schmidgall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

  Walt Whitman’s Journalism: A Bibliography. Edited by William White. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1969.

  Walt Whitman’s New York: From Manhattan to Montauk. Edited by Henry Christman. New York: New Amsterdam, 1989.

  Whitman and Rolleston: A Correspondence. Edited by Horst Frenz. Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1952.

  With Walt Whitman in Camden. 9 vols. Edited by Horace Traubel. Various publishers, 1906—1961.

  WHITMAN: REVIEWS AND CRITICISM

  Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. New York: New York University Press, 1967.

  ——and Folsom, Ed. Walt Whitman and the World. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995.

  Aspiz, Harold. “Walt Whitman, Feminist.” In Walt Whitman Here and Now, edited by Joann P. Krieg. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985, pp. 9—88.

  Asselineau, Roger. The Evolution of Walt Whitman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.

  Beach, Christopher. “‘A Strong and Sweet Female Race’: Cultural Discourse and Gender in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.” American Transcendental Quarterly 9:4 (December 1995), pp. 283—298.

  Binns, Henry Bryan. A Life of Walt Whitman. London: Methuen, 1905.

  Bradley, Sculley. “The Fundamental Metrical Principle in Whitman’s Poetry.” American Literature 10:4 (January 1939), pp. 437-459.

  Brasher, Thomas L. Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970.

  Bucke, Richard Maurice. Walt Whitman. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1883.

  Burroughs, John. Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person. New York: American News Company, 1867.

  Callow, Phi
lip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.

  Ceniza, Sherry. “‘Being a Woman ... I Wish to Give My Own View’: Some Nineteenth Century Women’s Responses to the 1860 Leaves of Grass.” In The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, edited by Ezra Greenspan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

  ——. Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-century Women Reformers. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998.

  Cherkovski, Neeli. Whitman’s Wild Children: Portraits of Twelve Poets. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1999.

  Epstein, Daniel Mark. Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004.

  Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

  Erkkila, Betsy, and Jay Grossman, eds. Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

  Folsom, Ed. “The Whitman Recording.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 9 (Spring 1992), pp. 214-216.

  ——, ed. Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002.

  Garman, Bryan K. A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

  Garrett, Florence Rome. The Rome Printing Shop. Privately circulated, 1955.

  Goodale, David. “Some of Walt Whitman’s Borrowings.” American Literature 10 (1938), pp. 202—213.