Leaves of Grass Published - July 4, 1855

Walt Witman's 'Leaves of Grass' was published on this day in 1855.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi, and welcome to this day in history class, it
is July four. Poet Walt Whitman published his book Leaves
of Grass for the first time on this day in
eighteen fifty five. Sometimes people will quibble with the fact
that probably you couldn't go into the store on July
four to buy it because it was Independence Day and
it would store wouldn't have been open, but it's generally

(00:25):
recognized the July four was the day that this book
came out for the first time. So Wal Whitman was
born on May eighteen, nineteen. He was from very proud
and patriotic family. All of his siblings were named after
their ancestors or after the nation's founders, and they lived
in places that are boroughs of New York City today,
but at the time they were their own separate communities,

(00:46):
so places like Brooklyn and communities that are in central
and eastern Long Island. Walt Whitman went to public schools
for about six years, but for the most part he
was self educated, and before he published Leaves of Grass,
he worked in several other fields, especially journalism and teaching.
He also wrote some fiction. So in eighteen forty four,

(01:07):
Ralph Waldo Emerson published an essay called The Poet, in
which he meditated on what poetry is and what a
poet's place should be in society. Here's the thing that
he wrote in their quote, America is a poem in
our eyes. It's ample geography, dazzles the imagination, and it
will not wait long for meters. He was basically calling

(01:28):
for the United States to have its own poet to record,
to reflect, and to shape upon the young nation's consciousness.
He thought the nation needed a poet. So it's really
not completely clear whether this essay affected Walt Whitman's decision
to be a poet. There are critics who argue that

(01:49):
it definitely did not a certain but regardless, what he
went and did is basically exactly what Emerson said needed
to happen. He went out and he wrote the book
that Emerson said the nation was lacking. So what Whitman
printed the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his

(02:10):
own expense, seven and ninety five copies. That was all
that he could afford. And this book contains twelve poems.
None of them had titles. They were very different from
most poetry at the time. They were all over the
place in terms of their length, and they didn't fit
into conventional structures or rhyming patterns at all. The lines themselves,

(02:32):
like the written lines on the page, they were also
all over the place. They were very different and from
one another in terms of how long they were. And
they were so long that he actually printed it on
very wide paper so that he wouldn't have to break
the lines. He could print the whole thing out on
this very wide page. The tone of these poems is
relentlessly optimistic, and underlying the whole thing is this focus

(02:55):
on the promise of what American democracy had the potential
to be. So he sent a lot of copies of
this book to lots of other poets. No one really cared,
except for Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose letter that he wrote
in response began, quote, I greet you at the beginning
of a great career. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fact that Walt

(03:17):
Whitman had written exactly the kind of book that Ralph
Waldo Emerson said needed to be written meant that Ralph
Waldo Emerson liked it A lot. Leaves of Grass wasn't
the only thing that Walt Whitman worked on for the
rest of his career. But he did work on it
a lot. He kept releasing multiple new editions of the
book that would have new poems and revisions of the

(03:39):
old one. The eighteen fifty six edition was on smaller paper.
The idea was that you could just carry it in
your pocket, and he put the word poem in the
titles of all the poems, maybe because of all the
criticism that he had gotten after the first edition that
these things that he had written were not even poetry.
The eighteen sixty edition was even more controversial because it

(04:01):
included Children of Adam, which was a celebration of the
body and of sexual relationships between women and men, and
it also included another group of poems called the Calamus
Cluster and that celebrated love between men. This got the
book banned in a lot of places, but it was
really this edition that started to sell pretty well, maybe

(04:23):
in part because of all that controversy about its contents.
The American Civil War really affected Walt Whitman's book. He
had been so optimistic in his poetry about what America
could be, and the nation was literally tearing itself apart
over the issue of whether it was okay to own
human beings. This property. He couldn't keep writing relentlessly optimistic

(04:46):
poetry in that kind of environment. The eighteen sixty seven
edition of Leaves of Grass included some of his wartime
poetry in the form of drum Taps and sequel to
drum Taps. But this edition came out in a lot
of different persians, and some of those poems were in there,
and sometimes the edition would not have those poems. The
whole thing was very haphazard and full of airs. It

(05:10):
was really almost like he had ripped up his own
work the way the country had torn itself up and
then tried to stick it back together. Whitman spent the
last years of his life in Camden, New Jersey, where
he died on March two at the age of seventy two,
and today he's remembered as one of the nation's most
influential and groundbreaking poets. You can learn more about Walt

(05:31):
Whitman and his work in the April seventeen seventeen episode
of Stuffy Miss in History Class. You can subscribe to
This Day in History Class on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
and wherever else do you get your podcasts. Tomorrow, we'll
be visiting a factory full of phosphorus,