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Our 'secular scripture'

By MARGO HAMMOND
Published July 10, 2005

In July 1855, Walt Whitman published 800 copies of a collection of poems he called Leaves of Grass. It was one of the most successful self-publishing ventures ever.

"I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Whitman in a letter dated July 21. "I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty."

Now, 150 years later, Americans are still celebrating what Harold Bloom calls the "secular scripture of the United States of America." Two special editions have been issued to mark the anniversary. Both offer the 1855 text in its original and complete form - Whitman continued to revise and republish the text over his lifetime - and sport covers that reproduce the foliage-draped lettering from the original edition.

"The 1855 edition broke ground in many ways," writes Whitman scholar David Reynolds in his afterword in Oxford University Press' anniversary edition. "In its relaxed yet heightened style, which prefigured free verse; in its sexual candor; in its images of racial bonding and democratic togetherness; in its philosophical suggestions; in the brash self-confidence of its first-person persona; and in its passionate affirmation of the sanctity of the physical world."

The Oxford edition includes 20 reviews of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Emerson's letter to Whitman and Whitman's response.

Yale University's Bloom provides an "Introduction and Celebration" to the Penguin Classics anniversary edition. "In proportion to his actual aesthetic achievement, Whitman remains undervalued and misunderstood," he writes. "He is the greatest artist his nation has brought forth, but such judgment needs to be taken further. No comparable figure in the arts has emerged from the last four centuries in the Americas: North, Central, South, or the Caribbean. Whitman's peers are Milton, Bach, Michelangelo, baroque masters of sublimity."

The original text of Leaves of Grass had no titles. Only later did Whitman choose such now-immortal titles as "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric." And those 800 original copies? They have become collector's items. One is currently offered online for $60,000.

[Last modified July 9, 2005, 09:08:02]