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f pure American breed, large and lusty
—age thirty-six years,” an early review of Leaves of Grass depicts its author,
“never once using medicine—never dressed in black, always dressed freely and
clean in strong clothes—neck open, shirt collar flat and broad, countenance
tawny transparent red, beard well mottled with white, hair like hay after it has
been mowed in the field and lies tossed and streaked.” This unsigned 1855 article
in the Brooklyn Daily Times hails “A rude child of the people!—No imitation—
No foreigner—but a growth and idiom of America.... The effects he produces
in his poems are no effects of artists or of arts, but effects of the original eye or
arm, or the actual atmosphere, or tree, or bird.”
A rousing salvo, as promising as any writer could desire for a first book, self-
published and anonymous. The thing is, he himself wrote it, Walt Whitman
(1819–1892). And went on ringing his own bell. The Sage of Concord, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, had sent a letter of thanks for “the most extraordinary piece
of wit and wisdom that America has contributed.” Without asking permission,
Whitman had the letter published in the New York Tribune. Then after a year,
givingLeaves of Grass a second edition, he not only included Emerson’s letter
(again without authorization), but printed a salute from it in gilt letters on the
spine of this dark green volume: “I Greet You at the / Beginning of A / Great
Career / R. W. Emerson.”
Then Whitman added an “open letter” to Emerson, “dear Friend and Master,”
“Nature was naked, and I was also”
Adamic Walt Whitman
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O