![]() ![]() It was not until 1881 that the first and longest was given the name “Song of Myself”. ![]() The twelve poems that make up the text of the first edition are untitled. The size and the leafy decoration and lettering on the dark green covers suggest a Victorian botanical scrapbook. The book is only 95 pages long but is printed on large paper. Whitman’s name did not appear on the title page instead his now-famous portrait was featured opposite as a frontispiece. The first edition of Leaves of Grass was, like its author, an oddity in mid-19th century America. The poet himself was involved in all aspects of design and production, even helping to set some of the type. The book was printed at the shop of Whitman’s friends Andrew and Thomas Rome. Whitman had worked as a printer and newspaper publisher, and this first edition of his poetry was self-published in every sense of the word. The young Walt Whitman heeded Emerson’s call for an American poet, and the result in 1855 was Leaves of Grass. ![]() “We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer then in the middle age then in Calvinism.Yet America is a poem in our eyes its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.” ![]()
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