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Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman
- Used
- Very Good
- Hardcover
- Condition
- Very Good
- Seller
-
Vancouver, Washington, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL EDITIONS OF THIS MONUMENTAL BOOK EVER CREATED
IT IS NOW 58 YEARS OLD AND VERY WELL-PRESERVED
THE TEXT OF THIS BOOK WAS TAKEN DIRECTLY FROM THE ORIGINAL ONCE-BANNED MANUSCRIPT HELD ON FILE AT YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
BOUND IN A BEAUTIFUL GOLD/SILVER STAMPED FOREST GREEN WITH FLORAL LEAF PATTERNS THAT ARE IN REMARKABLE CONDITION
Who would ever think that such a remarkable, beautiful book was once banned and burned in the 19th century? Well, it was, but no more. Leaves of Grass" is a groundbreaking collection by American poet Walt Whitman. First published in 1855 and expanded throughout Whitman's lifetime, it is considered one of the most influential works in American literature. The collection celebrates the human spirit, nature, democracy, and the interconnectedness of all things. Whitman's free verse style and expansive themes challenged the traditional poetic conventions of his time, revolutionizing the way poetry was written and appreciated. I have owned many printings of this book. However, this is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful and "well-preserved." I would snag this one before it's gone...
This is a stunning and meticulously preserved facsimile edition of "Leaves of Grass," the timeless poetry collection by Walt Whitman. This particular edition is a faithful facsimile of the original 1855 first edition, bound in a luxurious forest green cover with exquisite gold stamping adorned with delicate leaf motifs. This facsimile edition faithfully captures the essence of the original 1855 edition, allowing readers and collectors to experience the poetry as it was first presented to the world. This copy of "Leaves of Grass" is in near-perfect condition, meticulously preserved over the years. It has been lovingly cared for, ensuring that every page and detail remains intact. The forest green cover, adorned with gold/silver stamping and intricate leaf motifs, exudes elegance and sophistication. It adds a touch of luxury to this remarkable edition, making it a true collector's item. Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is regarded as a cornerstone of American literature, an epic exploration of the human experience, nature, and the interconnectedness of all things. Owning this facsimile edition allows you to delve into Whitman's poetic genius and immerse yourself in his revolutionary verses. Whether you are a passionate poetry lover, a dedicated collector, or an admirer of classic literature, this facsimile edition of "Leaves of Grass" is a rare find that combines historical significance with aesthetic beauty. It is a testament to the enduring power of Whitman's words and a true gem for any book enthusiast.
The condition of this book is excellent. All that could be mentioned is there is a hand written poem inside the blank free end paper and a previous owners stamp. Very clean and just lovely.
"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."
"Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know."
"If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles."
"I believe that much unseen is also here."
"The sum of all known value and respect, I add up in you, whoever you are."
"To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls."
The overall condition of this book is exceptional, and for a printing from 1966, it is about as nice as it gets—a marvelous printing.
"CONCORD, MA, 21 July, 1855,
Dear Sir, I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of " Leaves or Grass.
It is the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy to read it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.
I give you the joy of your free and brave thought. I have great pleasure in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the course of treatment delights us and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. 1rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam was no illusion, but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and ear courage hot now until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor and have struck my tasks and visit New York to pay you my respects.
R. W. EMERSON.
WALT WHITMAN"
"The text of this facsimile of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, published by Whitman in Brooklyn in 1855, is reproduced from a copy in the Library of Yale University. The eight pages of first comments and reviews, added to later copies of the first edition by Whitman and containing a review in The American Phrenological Journal specifically attributed to the poet himself, are from a copy in the collection of The Pierpont Morgan Library. The printed text of the letter Emerson sent to Whitman, a facsimile of one the poet had printed and pasted in the front of a few copies, is from the Library of Brown University. The lettering and ornamentation on the binding have been copied from first editions in the New York Public Library and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. Grateful acknowledgment is here made to these libraries for granting permission and for the generous cooperation that has made this facsimile possible."
"Leaves of Grass" is a groundbreaking poetry collection by American poet Walt Whitman. First published in 1855 and expanded throughout Whitman's lifetime, it is considered one of the most influential works in American literature.
The collection is a celebration of the human spirit, nature, democracy, and the interconnectedness of all things. Whitman's free verse style and expansive themes challenged the traditional poetic conventions of his time, revolutionizing the way poetry was written and appreciated.
"Leaves of Grass" is divided into several sections, each exploring different aspects of life and existence. Whitman's poems touch on various subjects, including love, sexuality, spirituality, democracy, the beauty of the natural world, the individual's place in society, and the essential unity of all people.
The collection showcases Whitman's belief in the inherent goodness and divinity of humanity, emphasizing the importance of embracing one's individuality and living authentically. His inclusive and egalitarian vision celebrates the diversity of human experience and calls for social and political harmony.
Through vivid and evocative language, Whitman invites readers to embark on a journey of self-discovery, encouraging them to connect with their inner selves and to find meaning and purpose in the world around them. The poems are filled with vivid imagery, rhythmic cadences, and a profound sense of wonder that captivates readers and invites contemplation.
"Leaves of Grass" continues to resonate with readers across generations, inspiring countless poets and leaving an indelible mark on American literature. It remains a testament to the power of poetry to explore the complexities of the human experience and to illuminate the beauty and significance of everyday life.
Synopsis
Leaves of Grass (1855) is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman. Among the poems in the collection are "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and in later editions, Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. " Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death. The first edition published in 1855 contained 12 poems on 95 pages. The final edition published contained almost 400 poems.
Reviews
On May 15 2016, a reader said:
Registered for copyright on 11 September 1856, the second edition of Leaves of Grass resulted from the continued surge of creativity that produced the first edition. The title page does not bear the author's name, but the verso page copyright is assigned to Walt Whitman (cf. Walter Whitman in the first edition). The little volume is bound in olive-green cloth; its front cover is blindstamped with leaves and berries and goldstamped "Leaves of Grass"; its back cover (without goldstamping) is identical. The spine is goldstamped with the title, leaf designs, and "I Greet You at the / Beginning of A / Great Career / R.W. Emerson." Unlike the slim outsized format of the first edition, this thick, squat volume measures approximately 6 2/3 by 3 3/16 inches and looks "like a fat hymn book" (Allen, Introduction xvi). The poems are set in well-leaded ten-point type, so that Whitman's characteristically long lines tend to overflow, sometimes three or four times. The New York Tribune advertised the one-dollar volume as "handy for pocket, table, or shelf" (Stern 121), so that when Whitman (in "Whoever You are Holding Me Now in Hand") challenges the reader to "carry me" "beneath your clothing," in breast or hip pocket, he imagines this volume as the embodiment of himself.
The volume's frontispiece is a photograph of Whitman in the "carpenter" pose. Its 32 numbered poems, including all 12 carried over from the first edition, are for the first time given titles. They are followed by "Leaves-Droppings," consisting of Emerson's encouraging but private 21 July 1855 letter of praise (previously reprinted in the 10 October 1855 New York Tribune and tipped into some late issues of the first edition); Whitman's "dear Friend and Master" reply, in effect, a prose essay; and "Opinions, 1855–56"—nine favorable and unfavorable reviews, including two anonymous self-reviews.
Despite its artistic merit, the volume was Whitman's greatest publishing failure. Its factual but unacknowledged publishers were Fowler and Wells, distributors of books and periodicals on phrenology, health reforms, and occasionally, belles lettres, to whose weekly Life Illustrated Whitman was then a contributor. Although reluctant to print the work, the firm advertised on 16 August in the same periodical that it was the principal distributor for this "neat pocket volume" in a stereotyped edition of 1,000 copies: "The author is still his own publisher, and Messrs. Fowler and Wells will again be his agents for the sale of the work" (qtd. in Stern 119). Despite Whitman's boast to Emerson that "these thirty-two Poems I stereotype to print several thousand copies of" (Comprehensive 730), sales were even poorer than those for the first edition; copies are now quite rare. Readers were embarrassed by such overtly sexual poems as "Spontaneous Me" and "A Woman Waits for Me," by the author's self-promotion, and by his unauthorized appropriation of Emerson's letter. Thus The Christian Examiner attacked the "foul work" ("Impious" 62) for its "pantheism and libidinousness" and its "self-applause" (63). Relations soured between poet and publisher. In 1857, when Whitman had 100 poems ready for the press, he declared that "Fowler & Wells are bad persons for me.—They retard my book very much" (Correspondence 1:44).
This edition is more programmatic than its predecessor. In a notebook jotting, Whitman defines the "Idea to pervade" the book as "Eligibility—I, you, any one . . . any being, no matter who" (Notebook 8). And in a characteristic mixture of semi-mystic populism and personal hauteur, he positions himself as the spokesman-poet of the American masses, telling Emerson that "A profound person can easily know more of the people than they know of themselves" (Comprehensive 733). His letter to Emerson—in effect an essay explaining his poetic intentions to the literary establishment in the critical 1856 election year—asserts that his poems are intended to unify the nation, "for the union of the parts of the body is not more necessary to this life than the union of These States is to their life" (Comprehensive 733). He proposes a new literature for America to inspire a free, democratic youth, aware of their singularity and their sexuality and destined to overcome personal and national corruption.
Like the authors of Fowler and Wells's manuals of reform and personal advice—many of whose ideas are interwoven into Whitman's poems—the persona often appears as a fatherly or brotherly counselor in matters physical, personal, or spiritual. At times his prescriptive tone borders on the prosaic, even the banal, and dilutes the intensity of some of the new poems. But Whitman was attempting to enlarge the poet-reader relationship by projecting himself as "the general human personality" (Bucke 63). And Whitman's contemporaries often found this hortatory tone to be congenial. Of this edition, Thoreau (while troubled by the edition's sensuality and its mixture of poetic wonders with "a thousand of brick") declared: "I do not believe that all the sermons, so-called, that have been preached in this land put together are equal to it for preaching" (Thoreau 68).
With the 1856 edition Whitman began his lifelong practice of adding new poems, reworking previously published poems, and reordering poems into different groupings. Thus the dozen poems of the first edition are here distributed in the following sequence: 1, 4, 32, 26, 7, 27, 19, 16, 22, 25, 29, and 6, beginning with "Song of Myself," here called "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American." He added, deleted, and combined lines. For example, he deleted the two-line curse against those who defile the human body at the end of the 1855 "I Sing the Body Electric" and added a 36-line quasi-anatomical catalogue. He also began the practice of removing over-used conjunctions and abandoned the idiosyncratic but rhetorically effective combination of dots, dashes, and conventional punctuation of the first edition in favor of a more standardized system.
The 1856 edition is more than an update; it is, in effect, a new work. Despite some poetic lapses, it is probably the most effectively designed of the six editions, and it is poetically dazzling. Its most impressive cluster of new poems, numbered 8 through 13, includes the following. The massive "By Blue Ontario's Shore," largely cannibalized from the 1855 prose Preface, is a paean to the present and future greatness of Americans ("It is I who am great, or to be great—it is you, or any one" [section 15]) and to the superb Whitman persona, the "equable," profound interpreter of the world and its symbols. "This Compost" evokes the persona's emotional interplay between his fear of death and his faith in the perpetuation of life. The short poem "To You [whoever you are]" is the persona's comradely outreach to his downtrodden fellows. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," with its stunning coloration and its musical and philosophical subtleties—the undisputed masterpiece of the second edition—pictures a deathless, empathic Whitman persona whose presence becomes palpable to generations of readers. "Song of the Open Road" presents the dynamic persona as a reader of the world's symbols proposing to lead the American masses out of their cramped existences into a continuum of transcendental selfhood. The group concludes with the sexually provocative "A Woman Waits for Me.''
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Details
- Bookseller
- Higgins Rare Books
(US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 751212149
- Title
- Leaves of Grass
- Author
- Walt Whitman
- Book Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Publisher
- The Eakins Press
- Date Published
- 1966
- Weight
- 0.00 lbs
- Keywords
- Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman, Classic, Poems, Poetry, Antique, Vintage, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Longfellow, Gift, Hardcover
Terms of Sale
Higgins Rare Books
30 day return guarantee, with full refund including original shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.
About the Seller
Higgins Rare Books
Biblio member since 2024
Vancouver, Washington
About Higgins Rare Books
I have been collecting rare books for years. I only sell things I love.
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- New
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- Leaves
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- Facsimile
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