The New Bible
WHITMAN, Walt Leaves Of Grass. Boston: Thayer and Eldridge.1860.
8vo. Original brown pebbled cloth with blind-stamped boards, spine with gilt lettering and design of a butterfly; pp. [vi], 456, [2], frontispiece engraving of Whitman, engraved tailpieces to pp. iv and 456 of a butterfly perched on a finger; slightly cocked, minor soiling to pastedowns, otherwise a very good copy.
Third edition, the first edition published by someone other than the poet himself, including the first publication of the major poems "A Word Out of the Sea", retitled "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" in later editions, and "I Hear America Singing".
This edition of Whitman's work is significantly expanded from the two self-published pamphlets of 1855 and 1856, which contained twelve and thirty-three poems respectively. The success of the second edition persuaded Thayer and Eldridge to take the work on but, in a stroke of the kind of luck that dogged Whitman's professional career, the company went bust shortly after publication and could barely pay him $250.
The 1861 issue is the first to justify Whitman’s description of the work as America's “New Bible”. It had been expanded to include 146 poems, the largest single jump in the work’s life. Among the poems included here for the first time are the "Calamus" cluster, the most overtly homoerotic section, and "Enfans d'Adam", which shocked contemporary readers with its sexualised reading of the Adam and Eve myth.
Despite the controversy and outrage that greeted Whitman's work upon its first publication - one reviewer called it a "mass of stupid filth" (The Criterion, 10 November 1855) - it has come to be considered a central work of American poetry, radical in form, epic in its treatment of democracy, nature and love, and courageous in its sexual frankness.
BAL 21397, cf PMM 340.
SKU: 2122828