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This month marks the 150th anniversary of a landmark event in literary history: the publication of the first edition of Walt Whitman's ''Leaves of Grass."
When this thin volume, with its ornate green jacket, crude title page, and frontispiece showing the casually dressed Whitman, was advertised for sale on July 5, 1855, few could anticipate its tremendous impact on literature. The book met with sharp criticism. One reviewer, shocked by its sensual images, called it ''a mass of stupid filth." Another, puzzled by its emotional intensity, said its author ''must be some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium."
In the face of such attacks, Whitman promoted himself actively. An ex-newspaperman with contacts in the press, he published anonymously three long, glowing reviews of his own book in periodicals friendly to him. Referring to himself in the third person, he exclaimed, ''An American bard at last!" He asked," Was he not needed?" He provided the answer: ''You have come in good time, Walt Whitman!"
Whitman also publicized praise he received from his most ardent supporter, the Concord sage Ralph Waldo Emerson. The poet sent his volume to Emerson, who responded with an enthusiastic letter calling it ''the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." ''I have great joy in it," Emerson wrote, ''I find incomparable things said incomparably well." In a soon-to-be-famous declaration, Emerson added, ''I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Without Emerson's permission, Whitman had Emerson's letter printed in the New York Tribune and again in the appendix to the second edition of ''Leaves of Grass," published the next year.
Whitman's self-promotion, though at times tactless, was for a good cause. He was right when he insisted that America needed his poetry.
America still needs his poetry.
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