1
The second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856) was published as an octavo
volume that included all twelve poems of the 1855 edition and twenty-
four new poems. Fowler and Wells, the publishers of popular books and
periodicals devoted to phrenology, water cure, health and sexual reforms,
and a variety of “practical” subjects, issued the volume covertly, because,
as one of the ¤rm’s of¤cers wrote to Whitman, they wanted to “insist on
the omission of certain objectionable passages.”^1 (They later relented.)
Whitman’s relationship with these publishers had a notable bearing on
the outlook, the language, and the design of the second edition, and on
Whitman’s approach to his intended audience.
The 1856 “Poem of the Wonder of The Resurrection of the Wheat”
(renamed “This Compost” in 1871) is ideologically and thematically re-
lated to the 1855 meditation “To Think of Time.” Both poems show the
persona struggling against the fear that death may prove to be no more
than a meaningless annihilation, and both show him striving to maintain
his faith in some form of spiritual regeneration.^2 “This Compost” is a
two-part invention. Its ¤rst sixteen lines (as numbered in the ¤nal version
of Leaves of Grass) reveal the persona’s reaction to the unnerving prospect
of ultimately becoming no more than a piece of “foul meat” that is con-
signed to the earth and thus being betrayed “where I thought I was saf-
est.” By ¤xating on the possibility that after his burial nothing will be left
of him but terminal fertilizer, he becomes repelled by the earth’s very
luxuriance and bounty. His fear of coming in contact with what he fancies
to be an infectious earth ¤lled with rotted materials and corpses takes on
a paranoid tone, radically different from the affectionate tone the persona
had used while contemplating the grass-covered graves in “Song of My-