America’s ‘New Bible’
WHITMAN, Walt Leaves Of Grass. Boston: Thayer and Eldridge.1860.
8vo. Original rust-coloured vertical wavy-grain cloth with blind-stamped boards, beveled edges, spine with gilt lettering and design of a butterfly; pp. [vi], 456, [2], frontispiece engraving of Whitman (signed ‘Schoff’), 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.
Extremely rare first issue of the 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 author went to Boston to superintend the printing and binding. The publishers failed during the period of financial depression at the beginning of the Civil War and the plates were sold at auction to R. Worthington, who surreptitiously used them for the original imprint. There are, for this reason, four or more editions bearing the original Thayer and Eldridge imprint. The first issue is distinguished by the engraved portrait which is on an irregular tinted background and by the gilt embossed butterfly on the backbone of the binding [...] Copies of the first issue with the tinted portrait are extremely scarce’ (Shay).
This edition 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. This is Myerson’s Binding C, with a globe surrounded by clouds to the front board and a sun behind mountains to the rear; our frontispiece portrait of Whitman is in the first state, with the irregularly coloured background.
BAL 21397; Myerson A.2.3a (with the frontispiece in the first state); Shay, p. 19; Wells & Goldsmith, pp. 7-8; cf PMM 340.
SKU: 2122828