LEAVES OF GRASS. by Whitman Walt - 1872

Washington, DC: Walt Whitman, 1872. First Washington edition, cloth issue. 8vo, publisher's original dark green cloth, lettered in gilt on the spine. vi,384,120,14 pp. A well preserved, tight and clean copy of this very scarce edition, some light or normal evidence of age mellowing. The cloth colour still dark and unfaded. VERY SCARCE AND IMPORTANT EARLY PRINTING OF THIS AMERICAN MASTERWORK. Washington editions are rarely seen. This is the first time that LEAVES OF GRASS had appeared in book form with PASSAGE TO INDIA (published as a pamphlet in 1871), but adding a new poem here. The volume also contains “ After All, To Create Only” as an addendum (published for the first time).
Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS portrayed America at the crossroads between an old world, soon to be caste off, and the new world of our future present. With the publication of LEAVES OF GRASS in 1855, Whitman, the poet of democracy, ushered in a new era in American letters, describing specifically American experiences in a distinctly American idiom. From its first publication in 1855, he had complete confidence in the greatness of both the book and its author.
PASSAGE TO INDIA was written to celebrate the completion of the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railroad, in what would be the “ marriage of the continents”. And it is here that Whitman for the first time evokes Eastern ideas of spirituality and religion and predicts an America that combines “the physical and intellectual culture of the west, with the spirituality of the East..where the Poet, worthy that name; the true Son of God shall come singing his songs.”
“Always the champion of the common man, Whitman is both the poet and the prophet of democracy. The whole of LEAVES OF GRASS is imbued with the spirit of brotherhood and a pride in the democracy of the young American nation. In a sense, it is America’s second Declaration of Independence: that of 1776 was political, this of 1855 intellectual. ...The poems are saturated ‘with a vehemence of pride and audacity of freedom necessary to loosen the mind of still-to-be-formed America from the folds, the superstitions, and all the long, tenacious, and stifling anti-democratic authorities of Asiatic and European past’. To the young nation, only just becoming aware of an individual literary identity distinct from its European origins, Whitman’s message and his outspoken confidence came at a decisive moment.
“LEAVES OF GRASS was Whitman’s favorite child. From the time of its original publication...until the year of his death, he continued revising and enlarging it. If (his) reputation has fluctuated over the years and his position among, if indeed not at the head of, the list of great American poets was not assured until some time after his death, there was never any doubt of the matter in his own mind. ‘I know I am deathless’, he wrote. ‘Whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.’ Time has vindicated his conviction.” PMM