Whitman's Leaves of Grass

In July 1855 Walt Whitman, a Brooklyn printer, newspaperman and former teacher, published the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense. It was a thin volume of twelve untitled poems, of which the longest later became 'Song of Myself'. The poems have no rhyme or regular meter. Instead they use long, rolling lines, lists and the rhythms of speech, and they celebrate the body, nature, ordinary people and the self. The title page carried no author's name, only a portrait of Whitman in workman's clothes.¹²³

Whitman's influences were the King James Bible, the speeches and sermons of his day, opera and the American Transcendentalists, above all Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had called for a poet who would express American democracy. The Romantic movement had made the poet's own voice a subject, and the young American republic offered Whitman his theme. He wrote reviews of the book himself, anonymously, and he reissued and expanded it throughout his life, in several editions, up to a final 'deathbed' edition of 1891 to 1892.¹²

Sales were tiny, and many critics were shocked by the sexual frankness. Emerson, however, wrote Whitman a letter in July 1855 saying he greeted him at the beginning of a great career, and Whitman printed it without permission. During the Civil War he worked as a volunteer nurse in Washington, and wrote poems about it, including a memorial for Lincoln. Whitman became the founding figure of American free verse.¹²