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Walt Whitman |
In 1855, after trying to get his poems published in newspapers and magazines, Walt Whitman printed the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense, consisting of twelve untitled poems and a preface. Most of the copies were given away. More editions followed, each larger and more popular than the last. Thirty-seven years later, the “death-bed edition” included 389 poems, and he was the most popular poet in America.
As a battlefield nurse in the middle of the Civil War, he had taken to himself the wounds of the nation. As a public poet, enduring the disinterest, the contempt, and finally the love of his critics, he learned to sing with a candor and a passion that no other poet had dared to try. He broke from the structured forms of poetry past and let his lines follow the cadence of his speech. They rarely even rhymed. He left behind the dried out classical images of his peers and talked instead about the smell of his armpits (“aroma finer than prayer”), men bathing in the river, and kissing the lips of the dead.
But more than new forms and new references, he brought a new message, a tumultuous generosity of spirit that seemed at last equal to an America of immigrants and distances, of blood-soaked war and frank, unquestioning love. A critic at the time said of the first edition, “[Leaves of Grass] is like no other book that ever was written, and therefore, the language usually employed in notices of new publications is unavailable in describing it.”
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |