THE FOLIO SOCIETY

On 4 July 1855, an unknown journalist and printer’s devil named Walt Whitman published a book of poetry, written, designed, typeset and distributed by himself. Whitman sent a copy of the book to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who instantly hailed it as ‘the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed’. Today Leaves of Grass remains a visionary masterpiece, a hymn to nature and humankind’s place in it. In the words of former poet laureate Andrew Motion in the introduction to this edition, it is ‘quite simply one of the most remarkable first books of poems ever published’.

The publication of Leaves of Grass was a truly revolutionary event. The book’s very appearance set it apart, with a binding design based on roots and leaves, and a daguerrotype portrait of Whitman in lieu of a name or title page. Whitman aimed for ‘clearness, simplicity, no twistified or foggy sentences, at all’, and his flowing language prefigured the free verse of the 20th century. The poem’s sensual candour and unconventional structure caused consternation at the time, but the power of Whitman’s poetry has since thrilled countless readers. (‘Shoulder your duds, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth; /Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go’; ‘I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world’.)

In his preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman declared that ‘The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem … not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.’ His transcendental vision of an America united without barriers of race and creed encompasses the whole realm of physical and spiritual experience. This Folio Society edition is the only illustrated edition currently in print. The binding is based on the original design of the 1855 edition, and stunning woodcut illustrations by Abigail Rorer bring Whitman’s vision to new life.

Free and Brave Thoughts

ANDREW MOTION

Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate, discusses Walt Whitman’s celebration of the self in Leaves of Grass, and the ideals that influenced his revolutionary collection of poems.

The Leaves of Grass contained in the new Folio edition is the first edition (1855) of six that were published in Walt Whitman’s lifetime – the last appearing in 1891, shortly before his death. Over the years it acquired titles (the opening section was not called ‘The Song of Myself’ until 1881), some of its most famous elements, and the status of an American classic that has never since been diminished. Although these things might deepen or describe the impact of the poem, they do not change its course. On the contrary, this original edition has a unique focus and intensity. It is quite simply one of the most remarkable first books of poems ever published.

Whitman’s life before Leaves of Grass had followed a winding track. He was born near Huntington, Long Island, in 1819, the second of eight children who grew beyond infancy; his parents were followers of the radical Quaker preacher Elias Hicks. Four years later the family moved to Brooklyn where, after attending a public school, Whitman found employment as an office boy, as a printer’s devil, as a printer proper and as a teacher in rapid succession. From the late 1830s, becoming increasingly active in the Democratic Party, he spent a decade and more working and writing for various journals, including the Star, the Daily Eagle and the Brooklyn Freeman. At the same time, he turned his attention towards poems – though his characteristic style only becomes manifest in the notebooks of 1849–54, which he began after returning to live with his family. The comparative security of home, mixed with a re-identifying of his character as an honourable working-class artisan, allowed him to connect with himself – with what he calls ‘Me myself’ – as never before. While he turned inwards and back to his roots, his poetry exploded outwards.

Readers of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass were likely to encounter difficulties when they opened it for the first time. They still are. As presented in Folio’s edition, without most of the conventions (titles, stanza breaks, rhyme schemes) that readers expect to find in poems, with a Preface which itself has no title, and long lines that cascade down the page without giving any obvious clues about principles of organisation, the poem initially seems baffling. But as the clarity of Whitman’s voice breaks through, it’s evident that something like ‘fluid’ would be a better word. The pell-mell dash of the rhythms, the wide-armed rush into a massively detailed world of objects, the headlong plunge into the buried life of the individual, the intensely democratic vision of humankind and the entire planet: these are all ways of inviting us to relinquish our customary restraints and join the poet in his vision of how things truly are, or truly ought to be. The poem, in other words, practically shouts its invitation to share in the personal transformation that it both describes and promotes.

As this implies, the great revolution in Whitman’s writing around the mid-century, and the means by which it made itself recognisably ‘modern’, depended on a profound change in his consciousness of his self (not to mention his self-consciousness). It amounts to a view of the world that concentrates not on its suffering but on its capacity to promote joy, and which celebrates the self not simply as a marvellously observant and influential power in the world, but as a subject filled with intrinsic merits and fascinations. A self, moreover, which mirrors and absorbs the fascinations inherent in all other human selves. As the look of the poem confirms, this is evident not just in the themes of the writing, but in its structure and its language – the torrential lines which (in the first edition, at least) resist the temptation to move from evocation to argument, but exist instead in a continuously extended and exalted present, sounding a gigantic hallelujah.

The novelty of the achievement can lead us to think the poem came out of nowhere. In fact it is complicatedly rooted in the life of its times, and especially in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson who, in the second series of his Essays, which was written before he read Leaves of Grass, said: ‘I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times, and social circumstance…Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await.’ Immediately after Leaves of Grass was first published, Emerson acknowledged that ‘the timely man’ had arrived. On 21 July 1855 he wrote to Whitman: ‘I find [the poem] the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat & mean. I give you joy of your free & brave thought. I have great joy in it.’

Whitman tacitly acknowledges his allegiance to Emerson throughout the Preface to Leaves of Grass (speaking, for instance, of how ‘A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest’). But this fundamental allegiance, from which flows so much of the poem’s energy and intention, gave it a future as well as a past. Indeed, given the likelihood that it might seem ‘difficult’ to readers during the thirty-six years of its revision, it is very striking how soon others were responding as warmly as Emerson himself. Edward Everett Hale, for instance, who wrote in the North American Review of January 1856 praising ‘the wonderful sharpness and distinctness of [Whitman’s] imagination’. Or Oscar Wilde, who in 1889 called Whitman ‘the herald to a new era’. Or (moving into the twentieth century) D. H. Lawrence. Or Randall Jarrell. Or Allen Ginsberg. Or William Carlos Williams. Or any one of a number of poets and critics who have recognised Whitman’s ‘barbaric yawp’ as the sound of poetry breaking traditional forms and attitudes, and becoming distinctly modern.

In other words, and like all masterpieces, Leaves of Grass is a poem which tears up ‘literature’ as it becomes ‘literature’ itself. Emerson, who first made sense of the poem, deserves to have the last word: ‘I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be,’ he told Whitman. ‘I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.