He Set the Type Himself

On July 4, 1855 — the date was deliberate — a slim volume of poetry appeared in Brooklyn bookshops. It had no author name on the cover, just a title: Leaves of Grass. Inside, facing the title page, was a daguerreotype of a bearded man in workman's clothes, one hand on his hip, hat tilted, staring directly at the viewer with the confidence of someone who had just reinvented American literature and knew it.

The man was Walt Whitman, and he had set much of the type himself at a friend's print shop. He had also written several of the anonymous reviews that would later appear in newspapers. He had designed the cover. He had paid for the printing out of his own pocket. Seven hundred and ninety-five copies, of which he gave away most.

The book contained twelve poems, none of them titled, all of them written in a long, rolling, unpunctuated free verse that looked like nothing else in English. The opening poem — later titled "Song of Myself" — ran for over fifty pages and began: "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume."

Ralph Waldo Emerson Said Yes

Whitman sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most respected literary figure in America. Emerson wrote back immediately with a letter that Whitman, with characteristic brazenness, published without permission. Emerson called Leaves of Grass the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America had yet contributed.

He was right, though it took decades for the rest of the country to agree. The poems were too strange, too sexual, too democratic — in the deepest sense of that word. Whitman celebrated the body with an openness that shocked Victorian readers. He cataloged workers, immigrants, slaves, prostitutes, and outcasts with the same reverence that other poets reserved for sunsets and Greek gods. He wrote about male intimacy in terms that were transparent to anyone willing to read carefully (David Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, 1995).

The 1855 edition was a beginning. Whitman revised and expanded Leaves of Grass for the rest of his life, publishing six major editions, each larger than the last. The final "deathbed edition" of 1891-92 contained nearly 400 poems. It was the single project of his entire creative life.

The Wound Dresser

When the Civil War began, Whitman's brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg. Whitman traveled to Virginia to find him and stayed for three years, volunteering as a wound dresser in the military hospitals of Washington, D.C.

He visited tens of thousands of soldiers — Union and Confederate both — bringing them fruit, tobacco, paper, and the one thing many of them wanted most: someone to sit with them. He held their hands while they died. He wrote letters home for those who could not write. He contracted an infection that would damage his health for the rest of his life.

The hospital experience produced some of his greatest poetry, including "The Wound-Dresser" and the Lincoln elegies "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." But more importantly, it grounded his cosmic optimism in the reality of suffering. The Whitman of 1855 celebrated America's potential. The Whitman of 1865 had mopped the blood off its floors (Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself, 1999).

He contained multitudes. He said so himself, and for once, a poet's self-assessment was exactly correct.