Walt Whitman Pens 'Leaves of Grass'
Good morning, it’s May 15. On this date in 1855, an unknown but confident writer named Walt Whitman registered “Leaves of Grass” as a copyrighted work in court clerk’s office in New York. Poetry in this country would never be the same.
The first editions of “Leaves of Grass” were self-published - Walt Whitman was originally a printer – and although he helped set the type himself, the 1855 book did not include Whitman’s byline. Although this anonymous first printing sold modestly and received mostly negative reviews, that would soon change.
Whitman had been inspired a decade earlier by a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay that was a paean to poetry itself (“The poets are thus liberating gods”), but which was also a call for the United States to produce its own bard who could write about America’s beauty, strength, power, and hypocrisy with a musculature that equaled the young nation’s.
The essay found its mark. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman later wrote. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”
That water was still boiling a century and a half later when a college student named Bill Clinton gave “Leaves of Grass” to Hillary Rodham early in their courtship. As president, to his wife’s apparent chagrin, he also gave a copy of the poems to a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
It wasn’t the first time that book was the source of controversy in Washington. In 1865, while working at the Bureau of Indiana Affairs, Whitman was sacked after Interior Secretary James Harlan saw a copy of “Leaves of Grass” on the author’s desk at work. He apparently considered it smut.
Even at the time, the firing did not diminish Whitman’s reputation; and many years later, H.L. Mencken would describe this personnel blunder quite humorously: “'Let us repair, once a year, to our accustomed houses of worship and there give thanks that God one day in 1865 brought together the greatest poet America had produced and the world’s damnedest ass.”
That may have been a bit harsh. Although Secretary Harlan was a prude, he was friends with Abraham Lincoln, and – like Whitman – he loved the president. But he was already behind the times.
After his book’s modest 1855 sales, Whitman revised “Leaves of Grass” the next year – and the next and the next. (He was still revising it on his deathbed.) The reviews improved as the author became better known and the volume more substantive, but that wasn’t the only reason. The nation had changed, too.
What literary critics (and prominent Methodists like James Harlan) had once considered overly crude descriptions of the physical world in 1855 were seen a decade later to be a necessary and honest realism.
The Civil War had brought a leveling coarseness to the high-born and low-born alike. After all, what is more obscene than seeing brave young men cut down by the thousands on the battlefield? And when, in 1865, a final casualty of that war came after Appomattox, at Ford's Theater, Walt Whitman addressed himself to this death in poems published in subsequent editions of “Leaves of Grass.”
In “O Captain! My Captain!,” Whitman captures the stunned grief of a nation in a three-stanza poem of eight lines each – but one which manages in its opening words to pay homage to Lincoln’s victory over slavery.
“O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;”
A second poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” is about the same subject. It is a longer work, and here Walt Whitman once again answered the bell rung two decades before by Emerson.
It begins this way:
“When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd--and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
"O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love."
