Poetry
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman · 1855
Opening lines
One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Lying in the summer grass, the poet celebrates himself and declares that what he assumes, his reader will assume too; at the heart of the first poem, he names himself. He lists without hierarchy trades, States, rivers, bodies, the sick, fugitives, carpenters and prostitutes, all set on the same level by the catalogue. The twelve untitled pieces of 1855 grow from edition to edition; to them are added the hospitals of a war and the death of a president, until there are several hundred pieces.
Context
The first edition appeared in Brooklyn in 1855, at the author's expense: twelve poems, no name on the title page but an engraved portrait facing it, and the author himself set part of the type at the printer Andrew Rome's. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to him to greet the beginning of a great career; the sentence is printed in gold letters on the spine of the 1856 edition. In 1865, the Secretary of the Interior dismissed him from his office job, because of the book according to most biographers; in 1882, threatened with prosecution in Boston, the publisher gave up selling it. Nine editions in thirty-seven years lead to the so-called deathbed text.
Who it is for
Long pieces, in free verse, to be taken in the final edition for the whole or in that of 1855 for the origin, which are two different books.
Prizes and reception
Translated into most of the major languages, it founded American free verse, and its descendants range from Ezra Pound to Allen Ginsberg.
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