Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions by Walt Whitman Read Free Book Online

Whitman’s preferred trousers through the late 1850s were “bloomers,” the loose-fitting pants that were the male equivalent of those worn by women’s rights activists, such as Amelia Bloomer). “Leaves of Grass” was also an obvious metaphor for the unregulated, “organically grown” lines of the poems in the “leaves” of the book. But Whitman was also using “grass” as a symbol of American democracy. Simple and universal, grass represents common ground. Each leaf (Whitman thought the proper word “blade” was literally too sharp) has a singular identity yet is a necessary contributor to the whole. Likewise, each reader will find that he or she is part of Leaves of Grass— a book about all Americans that could have been written by any American (hence, the absence of the author’s name).
    When the first publisher Whitman approached refused to print the manuscript on the grounds of its offensive contents, he took it to the Rome printing shop on Cranberry and Fulton Streets in Brooklyn Heights. The Rome brothers were friends and neighbors, and they agreed to work on the volume if Whitman would lend a hand with the job. “800 copies were struck off on a hand press by Andrew Rome ... the author himself setting some of the type,” noted Whitman (Correspondence, vol. 6, p. 30). Legend has it that most of the copies remained in a back room of the shop “until they were finally discarded as liabilities” (Garrett, The Rome Printing Shop, p. 4). The price of two dollars was apparently deemed too high by Whitman, because a second issue printed later that year with a plain paper cover cost one dollar. “All in all a thousand copies were printed but practically none sold,” writes Florence Rome Garrett, the granddaughter of Tom Rome (Garrett, p. 4).
    Leaves of Grass was bound to be a quiet release, since the book was not printed or supported by a large publishing house with wide distribution, and did not even have a recognizable author’s name on the cover. A British name, in particular, would have helped, since midcentury America still looked toward England for artistic models and inspiration. Though political freedom had been established for decades, America was still a long way from gaining cultural independence. “Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not a history of theirs?” asked Emerson in Nature. Whitman replaced Emerson’s interrogation with imperatives in his preface. “Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest,” he insists in the preface to the First Edition (p. 10). This twelve-page, double-columned preface that stood between the reader and Whitman’s twelve poems remains his definitive declaration of independence: These new American poets would represent and inspire the people, assuming the roles of priests and politicians; the new American poetry would be as strong and fluid as its rivers, as sweeping and grand as its landscapes, as various as its people.
    As a living embodiment of the new poetry, the American reader was responsible for its grace, power, and truth. The urgent tone of the preface exposes Whitman’s desperation over the state of 1850s America—a country corrupted by its own leaders, torn apart by its own people, and facing an imminent civil war. His demands on readers were meant to shake awake a slumbering, passive nation and inspire a loving, proud, generous, accepting union of active thinkers and thoughtful doers:
    This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful