Leaves of Grass
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Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
Poetry
James Mustich
Aug 11, 2018
Having been a printer’s assistant, teacher, and newspaperman in New York and New Orleans, in 1855 a largely self-taught and unknown man named Walt Whitman self-published—not just footing the bill but designing the cover and setting the type—a small book called Leaves of Grass. Containing twelve untitled poems and a preface, it caused little stir, except in a reader named Ralph Waldo Emerson, who sent Whitman a letter of high praise. A year later Whitman released a second edition, this time with thirty-three poems (and, unbeknownst to its composer, Emerson’s epistolary endorsement). The poet would continue revising and republishing Leaves of Grass over the next thirty-odd years; the final edition, printed in 1892, by which time the “Good Gray Poet” had become a national treasure, contained 383 poems. His best poems are life-affirming hymns that strike what Abraham Lincoln—whom Whitman mourns in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”—once called “the mystic chords of memory.” Few poets have had his influence, and fewer still have so urgently charged the common language of their countrymen.
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3nmeinOB
Mar 25, 2019
The original edition
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Eli
Jan 29
Must read!
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