Walt Whitman Day: The Book He Kept Rewriting

Walt Whitman was born on 31 May 1819 on Long Island, the second of nine children in a family that moved constantly and was never far from difficulty. He left school at eleven.

What followed wasn’t a literary career in any recognizable sense. He was an office boy, a printer’s apprentice, a schoolteacher who disliked teaching, a newspaper editor several times over, a carpenter alongside his father, and a hospital volunteer through the Civil War.

Whitman is my kind of writer, and I don’t say that about many poets. He had no publisher and no interest in waiting for one, so he made the book he wanted anyway. Every self-published author who’s ever been sneered at should know his story better than they do.

He published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, at thirty-six, and spent the rest of his life revising it. He died in 1892 having produced six considerably different versions of what is nominally the same book.

How did Whitman publish Leaves of Grass?

Himself, at his own expense, in a shop belonging to friends.

He had no publisher and didn’t seek one seriously. He paid for the printing of about eight hundred copies, chose the paper and binding, designed the cover with its gilt lettering and organic sprouting forms, and set several pages of the type with his own hands, which he could do because he’d trained as a printer as a boy.

The book carried no author name on the title page. Instead there was an engraved portrait of a man in workman’s clothes, shirt open, hat on, standing at ease. Anyone who wanted a name had to find it two thirds of the way through the text, where the poet identifies himself in a line.

That’s a deliberate publishing decision. The picture claims the author is an ordinary working American, and withholding the name until the reader is inside the book makes the identification the reader’s discovery instead of the publisher’s assertion.

The trade barely noticed. It sold poorly, several booksellers refused to stock it, and one reviewer suggested the author should be horsewhipped.

That reviewer is exactly the kind of gatekeeper I can’t stand. The book he wanted whipped off the shelves is now in every American anthology, and I couldn’t tell you who he was. Any writer whose first book got a cold reception should take some comfort from that.

Watch: In Search of Walt Whitman, Part One: The Early Years (1819-1860), East Rock Films

Did Whitman review his own book?

Yes, anonymously, in at least three publications, and at length.

He wrote unsigned notices declaring that an American bard had at last arrived, describing the author’s physical health and manner approvingly, and positioning the book against the genteel English-influenced poetry of the period. He then reprinted the favorable reviews, including his own, in later editions.

He also printed a private letter of praise from Emerson on the spine of the second edition without asking permission, which Emerson was reportedly unhappy about.

Modern discussion of this tends to be either scandalized or amused. Neither reaction is very useful. What it shows is that a writer with no institutional support and no publisher understood that a book doesn’t sell itself, and that somebody has to make the argument for it in public.

That’s now called platform, and it’s exactly what a self-published author is told they must do. He was doing it in 1855 with the tools available. The Emerson letter is the one piece I’d hold against him. I don’t mind a writer drafting his own notices, and I’d call that hustle. Emerson’s private praise on the spine without his permission is another matter. That letter wasn’t Whitman’s to use, and I’d be furious if somebody did that with a note of mine.

Why did Walt Whitman keep revising Leaves of Grass?

Because he didn’t think of it as a book so much as a growing thing that had to keep pace with him and with the country. The 1855 edition contains twelve untitled poems and runs to about ninety-five pages. The final authorized edition of 1891 contains close to four hundred poems. Between them the poems were retitled, reordered, split, merged, cut and rewritten, sometimes heavily.

Scholars still argue about which version is best, and the argument is real. Many prefer the raw 1855 text and consider the later revisions a softening, with the poet tidying his own strangeness and adding respectability. Others hold that the mature arrangement is the achieved work and the first edition is a fragment.

What’s undeniable is the commitment. He spent thirty-seven years on one project while producing prose, journalism and correspondence around it, and he never treated any edition as final until the last one, which he called the deathbed edition and specified as authoritative.

I lean toward the raw 1855 text myself. Some of the later editions read to me like a man sanding down the parts that made him dangerous. I still admire the stubbornness of thirty-seven years on one book, even where I think the revisions cost him something.

What did the Civil War do to the work?

It removed the confidence and left something better.

His brother was wounded, and Whitman went south to find him. What he saw at the front changed the direction of everything afterward. He stayed in Washington, took clerical work, and spent his free time visiting military hospitals, by his own account making hundreds of visits over three years, writing letters for men who couldn’t write, bringing small gifts, and sitting with the dying.

The early poetry celebrates an expanding, self-confident America. The war poems don’t. They’re quieter, more particular, and preoccupied with individual bodies instead of a national body.

The best of them describe specific small things: a field hospital at night, a face under a blanket, three figures on stretchers. The rhetorical scale is gone and observation takes its place. These are the poems I’d hand to anyone who thinks they don’t like Whitman, because the showman has left the room and what’s left is a man sitting by a bed paying attention.

He was later dismissed from a government post when a superior read Leaves of Grass and found it indecent. That produced a defense of him by a friend that did more for his reputation than anything he’d written to that point.

What did Whitman do for a living?

Nearly everything except write poetry, and the working life is the reason the poetry sounds as it does.

A printer took him on as an apprentice at twelve, and he learned the trade properly. That’s why he could set his own type twenty-four years later. He taught school in his late teens and hated it. He founded and edited newspapers, was fired from at least one for his politics, and wrote an enormous volume of journalism, editorials and filler.

He also built houses. In the years immediately before Leaves of Grass he worked with his father as a carpenter and speculated in small property developments in Brooklyn, and somebody doing that work wrote the poems full of workers and trades.

After the war he held a series of government clerkships in Washington, which is unglamorous and mattered enormously: a steady salary let him keep revising the book without needing it to sell. That combination, a printer’s training, a journalist’s output and a day job that paid the rent, is close to an ideal setup for a writer with an unmarketable project, and none of it was planned.

Why was Leaves of Grass considered obscene?

Because it treats the body as ordinary, and in 1855 that was the transgression.

There’s very little in Leaves of Grass that a modern reader would flag. What there’s amounts to frank references to the body, to desire, to physical existence as something continuous with the spiritual instead of opposed to it. He refused the separation that respectable poetry of the period assumed.

The consequences were real. Booksellers declined it, a reviewer suggested he deserved a whipping, and he lost a government post when a superior read it. Decades later a Boston district attorney threatened prosecution and the publisher withdrew. That forced him to find another. He never cut the offending material. Every edition gave him an opportunity to remove what caused the trouble and he added to it instead.

That refusal is what I admire most about him. Every new edition offered him an easier life, and he chose the harder one each time. A writer who cuts the work to please a scold has made the cheapest surrender in publishing, and he never made it.

The banning also sold books. The Boston threat produced publicity that moved more copies than any edition before it, which he understood perfectly well and did nothing to discourage.

What is Walt Whitman’s free verse doing?

Replacing meter with breath and with the cadences of one kind of speech.

He’s routinely credited with inventing free verse in English. That overstates it. What he did was abandon regular meter and rhyme for a line governed by how long a thought runs when spoken aloud, and then build structure out of repetition instead.

The technique is largely borrowed from oratory and from the King James Bible: parallel constructions, anaphora, lines that begin the same way and accumulate. Read one of the long lists aloud and the debt is obvious, and so is the reason it works. The reader isn’t tracking a metrical pattern, they’re tracking a voice.

He also did something political with it. Regular meter carried associations of English refinement and formal education. A line built on ordinary American speech, listing ordinary American work, is an argument about who poetry belongs to before it says anything at all.

The clearest inheritance is in Morrison’s sentence rhythms and in almost every American poet who came after, whether or not they liked him.

Why does Walt Whitman matter to self-published authors?

Because he did every part of it, badly funded, and it worked. He paid for production, controlled the design, wrote his own promotion, sold copies directly, revised in response to what he learned, and kept the rights. The book that resulted is now in every American anthology, and it entered the canon from completely outside the publishing system of its day.

The real part of the story is that it took decades and he was never comfortable financially. Recognition arrived slowly, largely from England first, and he depended on friends and a subscription fund in his final years.

What that argues is that institutional rejection isn’t a verdict on a book, and that a writer who controls production can wait out an audience that hasn’t arrived yet.

Compare it to Dickens self-financing A Christmas Carol twelve years earlier and losing money on a sell-out. Both men chose control over margin, and both were right to.

What can a writer take from Whitman?

Four things.

Own the object. He controlled paper, binding, cover, typesetting and price, and every one of those decisions carried meaning that the poems alone couldn’t. Make the argument for your own work. Somebody has to, and if there’s no publisher then it’s you. The anonymous reviews are embarrassing and they were also correct about what the book needed. Treat the work as revisable for as long as you’re alive. Six editions across thirty-seven years is an extreme case, and the underlying principle is that publication isn’t the end of the thinking.

Let experience change the tone. The war poems are better than the confident early work because he stopped performing scale and started recording what he’d seen.

How should you mark May 31?

Read the 1855 preface, which is prose, runs about ten pages, and is among the best statements of purpose any writer has produced. Then read Song of Myself aloud, or as much of it as you can manage, because it was built for the voice and it collapses on the page for readers who try to take it silently.

If you want the war material, the hospital poems are short and are the part of his work that most people have never encountered.

Whitman showed that a writer shut out by the trade can build the book himself and outlast everyone who laughed at it. Self-published authors should claim him loudly, and it’s a missed opportunity that people make the argument so rarely when he’s sitting right there in every anthology.

For other writers whose days are worth marking I’ve written about Mark Twain, George Orwell and Toni Morrison.

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