Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions Read Free Page B

as Whitman’s brash, erotically charged Leaves of Grass . When the First Edition appeared in 1855, influential man of letters Rufus Griswold denounced the book as a “gross obscenity,” and an anonymous London Critic reviewer wrote that “the man who wrote page 79 of the Leaves of Grass [the first page of the poem eventually known as ”I Sing the Body Electric“] deserves nothing so richly as the public executioner’s whip.” Finding himself on the defensive early on, Whitman wrote a series of anonymous self-reviews that clarified the goals of Leaves and its author, “the begetter of a new offspring out of literature, taking with easy nonchalance the chances of its present reception, and, through all misunderstandings and distrusts, the chances of its future reception” (from Whitman’s unsigned Leaves review in the Brooklyn Daily Times, September 29, 1855).
    Five years later, Whitman’s own mentor Emerson, who advised against including the highly charged “Children of Adam” poems, tested his “easy nonchalance.” Holding his ground yet again, Whitman explained to Emerson that the exclusion was unacceptable since it would be understood as an “apology,” “surrender,” and “admission that something or other was wrong” (The Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 224). In 1882 Boston publisher James R. Osgood was forced to stop printing the Sixth Edition when the city’s district attorney, Oliver Stevens, ruled that Leaves of Grass violated “the Public Statutes concerning obscene literature.” After looking at Osgood’s list of necessary deletions from Leaves of Grass , Whitman responded: “The list whole and several is rejected by me, & will not be thought of under any circumstances” (Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life, p. 20). The sixty-three-year-old immediately sat down and wrote the essay “A Memorandum at a Venture,” a diatribe condemning America’s close-minded and unhealthy attitudes toward sexuality. Whitman’s poems continued to provoke harsh criticism and calls for censorship through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: As recently as 1998, conservatives were given another opportunity to condemn the book’s suggestive content when President Clinton gave Monica Lewinsky a copy as a gift. Lewinsky’s own critique of Whitman, enclosed in her thank you note, facilitated the controversy: “Whitman is so rich that one must read him like one tastes a fine wine or good cigar—take it, roll it in your mouth, and savor it!”
    Whitman would have probably laughed in approval of Lewinsky’s reading. Despite the relentless public outcry and his permanent defensive posturing, he also “took in” and “savored” his poems as well as the writing process. From the publication of the First Edition in 1855 until his death in 1892, he continued to revise and expand his body of work. Leaves of Grass went through six editions (1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1881) and several reprints—the 1876 “Centennial” Edition that included a companion volume entitled Two Rivulets; the 1888 edition; and the “Death-bed” Edition of 1891-1892. He also published a collection of Civil War poems entitled Drum-Taps (1865) and added a Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865-1866). Though he began writing poetry relatively late, he never stopped once he started: Plagued by bronchial pneumonia for three months before his death, Whitman completed his last composition (“A Thought of Columbus”) on March 16, 1892, ten days before he died. So ended a literary life that had not seen the rewards of wealth, love, or the recognition of his fellow Americans; the poet could only hope that future readers and writers would embrace his message and carry it forth. Acknowledging that he had “not gain’d the acceptance of my own time” in 1888, Whitman described the “best comfort of the whole business”: “I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record—the value thereof to be decided by time” (“A Backward Glance