Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman
Summary
Leaves of Grass is not one poem but a collection Walt Whitman kept rewriting for the rest of his life, and the book to know first is the original: twelve untitled poems, ninety five pages, self published in Brooklyn on the Fourth of July, 1855, with no author's name on the title page, only a steel engraved portrait of Whitman in work clothes and a tilted hat. The longest poem, later called Song of Myself, announces its method in its opening lines, a speaker who claims to contain multitudes and addresses the reader directly, walking city streets and battlefields and riverbanks in long unrhymed lines that break every rule of the polite, metered verse American readers expected in 1855. Whitman kept expanding the book for the next thirty seven years, adding Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and, after Lincoln's assassination, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd and O Captain My Captain, until the final deathbed edition of 1892 ran to nearly four hundred poems.
Reading Whitman means adjusting to lines that run the length of a sentence and a voice that refuses to stay modest, cataloguing workers, lovers, animals, and cities in the same breath. It asks patience rather than difficulty, and it rewards a reader willing to let the accumulation build rather than looking for a single tidy image. The 1855 preface, printed in tiny type before the poems begin, argues for exactly this kind of American poetry, and it is worth reading before the poems themselves.
Whitman printed roughly eight hundred copies of the first edition and bound only two hundred in the green cloth cover now associated with it.
Historical Context & Significance
Ralph Waldo Emerson, sent an early copy, wrote back on 21 July 1855 that he found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed," a private letter Whitman later printed in gold leaf on the spine of the 1856 edition without asking permission, to Emerson's lasting irritation. Other readers were openly hostile: the critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold called it "a mass of stupid filth" that November, and John Greenleaf Whittier reportedly threw his copy into the fire.
The book survived every attempt to suppress it. When Boston's district attorney declared it obscene literature in 1882 and demanded cuts, Whitman refused and simply moved to a new publisher; the resulting edition sold out in a day. Leaves of Grass is now read as the founding text of a distinctly American free verse, its influence reaching Ralph Vaughan Williams's choral A Sea Symphony, which sets Whitman's own lines to music, and the copies the United States government distributed to soldiers during the Second World War.