I share the midnight orgies of young men . . .
I pick out some low person for my dearest friend,
He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate, he shall be condemned by others for deeds done,
I will play a part no longer, why should I exile myself from my companions?
Literary society was not quite ready for Walt Whitman when his transformative collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, was published in 1855.
A landmark of American literature, here we have a book that fairly staggers us. It sets all the ordinary rules of criticism at defiance.
When the collection was released however, the contemporary reviews were more than skeptical. One 1856 review suggested that Whitman be sent to an insane asylum, for it was “one of the strangest compounds of transcendentalism, bombast, philosophy, and folly, ever entered into the heart of man to conceive.”
Others felt differently. For example, The New York Daily News review had this to say: “For the sum of 75 cents, any reader may accompany Whitman through a poetic chaos—bright, dark, splendid, common, ridiculous and sublime—in which are floating the nebulae and germs of matter for a starry universe of organized and harmonious systems that may yet revolve in all the magnificence of artistic order, through the highest heaven of fame…”
WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892), one of the greatest authors of the nineteenth century, transformed forever the art of poetry. He is considered by many to be the quintessential American poet. His subversive vitality and sexual flare continues to exert a profound influence to this day.
“This uncensored new edition of Leaves Of Grass is quite simply the most unambiguously clear-eyed version of Walt Whitman’s anthem to bisexuality and independence ever published…”
—Daniel Joyce
