Walt Whitman spent 37 years rewriting one book of poems
Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass on July 4, 1855: twelve untitled poems in 95 pages, with no author named on the cover. He then revised and expanded it until his death in 1892. Emerson hailed it; many critics were scandalised by its frank delight in the body.
The seed was an 1844 essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet, which called for a new American voice able to sing the young nation's virtues and faults. Whitman answered with verse that almost never rhymes and pays more attention to bodies and the physical world than to religion, cataloguing the sprawl of American democracy along the way.
The first edition was a deliberate puzzle. Whitman registered the title in May 1855, a pun on publishing slang, since grass meant minor work and leaves meant pages. Neither author nor publisher was named; both were Whitman. Instead an engraving by Samuel Hollyer showed him in work clothes and a tilted hat, a portrait of the carefree working man. There was no table of contents, and roughly 800 copies were printed. He wanted a book small enough for a pocket, so people would take him outdoors, where he felt he won readers over.
He mailed a copy to Emerson, who replied that it was the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America had yet produced. Whitman let the letter run in the New York Tribune and, for the 1856 second edition of 384 pages, stamped the line greeting him at the start of a great career on the spine in gold. Later printings brought money trouble: the publishers of the 1860 edition went bankrupt and paid him only 250 dollars.
How many editions exist depends on the definition. Counting only entirely new typesettings gives six; counting reprints gives nine. Along the way the book gathered famous pieces such as Song of Myself and, after Lincoln's assassination, the elegy When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. Once derided, it is now counted among the central works of American poetry.
Source: Leaves of Grass
