Emerson's Letter to Walt Whitman, 21st July 1855

Letter to Walt Whitman from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Concord 21 July

tts
Mass  .. 1855

Dear Sir —

              I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading 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 joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so 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. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

I did not know 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 felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects.

R. W. Emerson

Mr. Walter Whitman

Letter to Walt Whitman from Ralph Waldo Emerson — Whitman had this letter printed in an appendix to the second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856.

the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass” — Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass himself in a planned edition of 800 copies, of which 795 ended up bound. Whitman worked alongside the printer Andrew Rome, proofreading and making changes as the copies came off the hand-cranked press. Some of the changes were substantive, while others were to fix mechanical problems such as slipping type. (Printing presses of the time were often unstable, and some of the type could slip during the run.) The pages were an unusually large size — 11 1/8 by 8 1/8, which means the sheets of paper were 22 1/4 by 16 1/4, with four pages printed on each side, and then folded into signatures — because Rome was not a book-printer. Leaves of Grass was the first book he had ever printed; most of his work was legal forms (the size of the pages was the standard one for legal documents) and cheaply made pamphlets. For a fuller explanation of the first printing of Leaves of Grass and the variants therein, see Folsom, Ed. “The Census of the 1855 Leaves of Grass: A Preliminary Report.” The Walt Whitman Quaterly Review, Volume 24, No. 1, 2006, pp. 71-84. The 795 copies were printed in several different covers, most famously green morocco (goat-skin leather) but also cloth, cardboard, and paper versions (in descending order of cost). The official publication date was the 4th of July, 1855 (of course it was), but the first two-hundred copies were bound in June, so the printing itself, which would have taken only hours, must have been done then. Whitman sent Emerson a copy shortly after the first set was bound.

I could trust the name — Whitman’s name does not appear on the cover or title-page of the 1855 Leaves of Grass. His name appears in two places in the book: 1) On the back of the title-page is printed, “Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1855, by Walter Whitman [in small-caps], in the Clerk’s office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.” 2) The poem that would later be titled “Song of Myself” contains the following passage:

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . . eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist . . . . no stander above men and women or apart from them, no
           more modest than immodest.

visting New York to pay you my respects — This visit never occurred. Whitman had attended one of Emersons lectures in 1842. The talk, titled “Nature and the Powers of the Poet,” eventually formed much of the essay titled “The Poet,” but they did not speak then. Whitman came to Boston just before the publication of the third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1860, and the two men met then. They met only one other time, in 1882, when Emerson was dying and his mind was failing. (See the entry on Emerson written by Jerome Loving in The Whitman Encyclopedia edited by J.R. LeMaster and Donald Kummings, Garland, 1998, reproduced at The Whitman Archive).

Letter to Walt Whitman from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Concord		21 July
tts Mass ..		1855
Dear Sir — I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading 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 joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so 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. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging. I did not know 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 felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects. R. W. Emerson Mr. Walter Whitman

Letter to Walt Whitman from Ralph Waldo Emerson — Whitman had this letter printed in an appendix to the second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856. the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass” — Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass himself in a planned edition of 800 copies, of which 795 ended up bound. Whitman worked alongside the printer Andrew Rome, proofreading and making changes as the copies came off the hand-cranked press. Some of the changes were substantive, while others were to fix mechanical problems such as slipping type. (Printing presses of the time were often unstable, and some of the type could slip during the run.) The pages were an unusually large size — 11 1/8 by 8 1/8, which means the sheets of paper were 22 1/4 by 16 1/4, with four pages printed on each side, and then folded into signatures — because Rome was not a book-printer. Leaves of Grass was the first book he had ever printed; most of his work was legal forms (the size of the pages was the standard one for legal documents) and cheaply made pamphlets. For a fuller explanation of the first printing of Leaves of Grass and the variants therein, see Folsom, Ed. “The Census of the 1855 Leaves of Grass: A Preliminary Report.” The Walt Whitman Quaterly Review, Volume 24, No. 1, 2006, pp. 71-84. The 795 copies were printed in several different covers, most famously green morocco (goat-skin leather) but also cloth, cardboard, and paper versions (in descending order of cost). The official publication date was the 4th of July, 1855 (of course it was), but the first two-hundred copies were bound in June, so the printing itself, which would have taken only hours, must have been done then. Whitman sent Emerson a copy shortly after the first set was bound. I could trust the name — Whitman’s name does not appear on the cover or title-page of the 1855 Leaves of Grass. His name appears in two places in the book: 1) On the back of the title-page is printed, “Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1855, by Walter Whitman [in small-caps], in the Clerk’s office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.” 2) The poem that would later be titled “Song of Myself” contains the following passage: Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . . eating drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist . . . . no stander above men and women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest. visting New York to pay you my respects — This visit never occurred. Whitman had attended one of Emersons lectures in 1842. The talk, titled “Nature and the Powers of the Poet,” eventually formed much of the essay titled “The Poet,” but they did not speak then. Whitman came to Boston just before the publication of the third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1860, and the two men met then. They met only one other time, in 1882, when Emerson was dying and his mind was failing. (See the entry on Emerson written by Jerome Loving in The Whitman Encyclopedia edited by J.R. LeMaster and Donald Kummings, Garland, 1998, reproduced at The Whitman Archive).