Leaves of Grass

Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 as twelve untitled poems and an unsigned preface, and then spent the rest of his life rewriting and expanding it — the book grew through six more editions until the 1891-92 printing. The first edition is the one the curator’s link reproduces, and it is the shock: long unrhymed lines built out of speech and catalogue rather than metre, a speaker who claims to contain multitudes, and an insistence that the body, the labourer and the ordinary American city are fit subjects for the highest poetry.

The book’s argument is political before it is formal. Whitman’s claim is that a democracy needs a poetry that does not look upward for its subjects, and he makes it by naming occupations, places and bodies at length until the accumulation becomes the point. Ralph Waldo Emerson read the first edition and wrote to greet Whitman “at the beginning of a great career” — Whitman printed the private line on the spine of the next edition without asking, which tells you something about him too.

Context: Listed under Poetry in the Ages 13-99+ band, Lexile 1310. Worth knowing before opening it: the 1855 text and the 1892 text differ substantially, and much of what people quote comes from the later revisions.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; the adult “Ages 13-99+” band is the part Kyle carded.
• Walt Whitman — the author.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson — the acknowledged influence and the book’s first significant reader.
• Transcendentalism — the movement Whitman comes out of, and past.
• Self-Reliance — the Emersonian idea the poems set to music.
• Individualism and Democracy — the two commitments the book is trying to hold together: the single self that contains multitudes, and the mass it is part of.
• Poetry — the form Whitman broke open.
• Republic of Letters — the portfolio idea.