The importance of the first edition of Leaves of Grass to American literary history is impossible to exaggerate. Ivan Marki writes in the Walt Whitman Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998) that About 200 copies of the 1855 edition are known to survive today. Whitman printed 795 copies of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, but the book did not sell particularly well.

He was in the room until the last, and went home next morning after a month’s stay– his first visit. Johnston wrote to mutual friend Horace Traubel on March 17, 1892įifteen years ago yesterday Walt was with us when my wife was taken sick and died. The autograph note reads: “Walt Whitman, visiting New York City after an absence of over four years– guest now of Mr. Smith copy includes a page from a 19th century autograph album tipped in at the front, inscribed by Whitman to his friend John H. One is from the library of Charles Babcock the other was purchased in 1954 with funds from the Oscar T. Smith Reynolds Library’s Special Collections holds two copies of the 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass. It was not until 1881 that the first and longest was given the name “Song of Myself”. The twelve poems that make up the text of the first edition are untitled. The size and the leafy decoration and lettering on the dark green covers suggest a Victorian botanical scrapbook.

The book is only 95 pages long but is printed on large paper. Whitman’s name did not appear on the title page instead his now-famous portrait was featured opposite as a frontispiece. The first edition of Leaves of Grass was, like its author, an oddity in mid-19th century America. The poet himself was involved in all aspects of design and production, even helping to set some of the type. The book was printed at the shop of Whitman’s friends Andrew and Thomas Rome. Whitman had worked as a printer and newspaper publisher, and this first edition of his poetry was self-published in every sense of the word. The young Walt Whitman heeded Emerson’s call for an American poet, and the result in 1855 was Leaves of Grass. “We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer then in the middle age then in Calvinism.Yet America is a poem in our eyes its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”

Leaves of grass by walt whitman