WHITMAN, WALT | Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn: [Fowler and Wells], 1856

The Property of a Gentleman

WHITMAN, WALT

Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn: [Fowler and Wells], 1856

12mo. Engraved frontispiece portrait of Whitman by Samuel Hollyer after a photograph, single advertisement leaf at end; scattered foxing throughout. Publisher's green cloth, spine gilt-lettered with Emerson's celebrated greeting, covers blindstamped, upper cover lettered in gilt, yellow-coated endpapers, redspeckled edges; spine faded and some minor wear at spine ends, but gilt remains generally bright. A nice copy of a scarce book.

Second edition, only printing; a nice copy of a notoriously fragile book. Wells and Goldsmith in their pioneering bibliography of Whitman already reported that this edition "is quite a rarity and is seldom found in good condition". About one thousand copies of the second edition were printed; it included twenty new poems not in the 1855 first edition and began Whitman's lifelong revision and expansion of his magnum opus. The additions to this edition include the celebrated poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (pp. 211–222), here titled "The Sun-Down Poem".

A section at the end, "Leaves-Droppings" reprints correspondence and reviews (many written by Whitman himself) of the first edition, including the full text of the 21 July 1855 letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson that Whitman excerpted on the spine of the second edition: "I Greet You at the Beginning of A Great Career." Whitman was a great self-publicist, of course, and if he accepted the notion that there is no such thing as bad publicity, he may have written the last quoted review in "Leaves-Droppings," attributed to the Boston Intelligencer: "a heterogeneous mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense. ... The book should find no place where humanity urges any claim to respect, and the author should be kicked from all decent society as below the level of a brute."

REFERENCE:

BAL 21396; Feinberg 271; Myerson A2.2; Wells and Goldsmith pp 5-6