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On July 6, 1855, the first advertisement appeared in the New York Tribune for the slender green book that changed the course of American poetry. Two dollars was a fair price for the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman intended to make his book available on July 4, but the bookstores were closed that day.
It is almost impossible now to measure the massive newness of those first twelve untitled poems-the sprawling free-verse lines, the cocksure optimism of his "democratic" voice, the idiom, which fused street lingo and operatic grandeur with religious conviction and erotic candor. Ralph Waldo Emerson recognized the author's brilliance immediately. His letter to Whitman, written on July at, famously "greet[s Whitman] at the beginning of a great career." The poet carried the letter in his pocket all summer. If Leaves seemed to spring out of thin air, still Emerson shrewdly guessed that it "must have had a long foreground somewhere."
Critics commonly mark the beginning of Whitman's poetic career in 1855. Whitman himself encouraged such a notion, suggesting in "Song of Myself" that "I, now thirtyseven years old in perfect health begin." (This line doesn't appear until the 18 8i edition of Leaves of Grass, published when Whitman was sixty-two.) But Emerson correctly assumed the serious and long preparation. By the late 1830s, still in his teens, Whitman was writing hard, and through the 1840s he published many poems, about two dozen short stories, a novel, as well as dozens-perhaps hundreds-of sketches, editorials, and reviews for New England newspapers and magazines. Much of this work was gathered by Thomas L. Brasher and reprinted in 1963 as Early Poems and Fiction, a volume of New York University Press's Collected Writings of Walt Whitman.
Whitman's first published poem appeared unsigned on October 31, 1838, in the Long Island Democrat. "Our Future Lot" is the work of a talented teenager, conventional in taste and form, and its speaker mines the traditional gloom and melodrama of the period's magazine verse. Appearing in Aurora on April 9, 1842, and written by "Walter Whitman," "Time to Come" is a substantially revised version of "Our Future Lot."
I don't claim that...