| In July 1855, about the time Americans were again celebrating their independence, an oversized book with the strange title Leaves of Grass was published in Brooklyn. The embossed, gayly decorated letters of the title seem almost to dance across the green cover. Neither on the cover nor on the title page is the author identified, an omission not unusual in an era when many books appeared anonymously. What is unusual is the frontispiece, an engraving based on a daguerreotype, of an unidentified workingman with a straw hat perched foppishly on his forehead, an exposed undershirt, said to have been red, and, paradoxically, the eyes of a seemingly detached dreamer/observer. The copyright in the name of Walter Whitman appears on the verso of the title page. |
| The author is not named until about the middle of the first poem, on page twenty-nine, to be exact, in one of the most grandiose and immodest lines in literature "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos." |
| Early readers, of whom there were but a few, could not recognize the significance of the line. At age thirty-six a man previously known publicly as Walter Whitman during a career that included employment in printing shops, on newspapers as reporter and editor in Brooklyn, briefly in schools on Long Island, baptized himself Walt Whitman and soon was to establish a first-name relationship with his audience. |
| The book of twelve poems without titles was a more personal creation than anyone could have imagined. Even its production in almost every detail was closely supervised by the author: he set part of the type himself and designed the cover. The color and the title introduce one of the symbols of his poetry, grass, and the dancing letters evoke the kosmic (to use his spelling) choreography and the universal "procreant urge," which in turn will be part of a democratic choreography created by a perceptive observer and lover of the heterogeneous, classless American society. |
|
