INTRODUCTION TO FIRST EDITION
Walt Whitman was a poet of great first
inspiration. That fact might come as a surprise to anyone who knows
how many times Whitman revised and expanded Leaves of Grass
over his lifetime. But the twelve “core poems” of the First Edition
are arguably Whitman at his best. This is Whitman in the raw: His
stance is defiant and provocative, his vision all-encompassing, his
voice uninhibited, his demands radical. The passion and energy of
his message and the rushing flow of the unregulated lines still
feel revolutionary, 150 years after the book’s publication. The
appearance of the First Edition even heralded a new way of
presenting poetry: Neither cover nor title page gave an indication
of an author’s name. Instead, across from the title page appeared
the image of a man who might have easily been the reader.
Everything about this book signaled the author’s desire, and
ability, to be an American literary pioneer. Indeed, Whitman had
overseen this project from his first vision for it, to composition,
to typesetting, to production and distribution; he even wrote
anonymous reviews of Leaves of Grass.
“An American Bard at last!” Whitman proclaimed of
himself in a self-review published in 1855. Whitman wrote two such
reviews that year to offer explanations of his unusual project and
stir up interest in Leaves of Grass. According to Florence
Rome Garrett, granddaughter of the printers who helped Whitman
produce the First Edition, “practically none sold.” The public’s
ambivalence may have been fostered in part by the lack of an
author’s name-not that placing “Walt Whitman” on the cover would
have done much to encourage sales. At best, fellow Brooklynites
might have recognized Whitman as a writer and sometime editor of
the city’s more liberal newspapers; others might have remembered
that he and his father had both worked as carpenters, and that
while Whitman Senior’s weakness may have been alcohol, Walt’s was
laziness. The name “Walt Whitman” had rarely been associated with
poetry before 1855. The “Additional Poems” section of this Barnes
and Noble Classics edition contains the only poetic efforts Whitman
is known to have published before the arrival of Leaves of Grass in
1855. Even the single poem in the 1855 edition that had previously
been published—“Resurgemus,” published in the New York
Tribune on June 21, 1850—underwent radical transformation
before becoming the eighth of the twelve poems. The interest in
reading through the first edition of Leaves of Grass, then,
derives not only from looking at it as a point of departure for
later editions, but also from marveling at this remarkable, as-yet
mysterious first effort.
—Karen Karbiener