The latest edition of Washington Post book critic Ron Charles' weekly Book Club newsletter (free to join even if you're not a Post subscriber, and highly recommended) contains this timely item. Enjoy!
 Walt Whitman in a steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison. This image was used as the frontispiece in the 1855 edition of “Leaves of Grass.” (Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division) |
Today is the anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth in 1819. He’s harder to catch these days, but as he once said, “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”
In the 1850s, as the United States was growing more violently contentious, Whitman was busy writing, revising and collecting his poems. The first edition of “Leaves of Grass” appeared in 1855.
In a fit of generosity, Ralph Waldo Emerson sent him a note, saying, in part, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”
Without asking permission from the sage of Concord, Whitman excerpted that phrase and printed it in gold letters on the spine of his enlarged 1856 edition of “Leaves of Grass.”
According to biographer Justin Kaplan, when Emerson got wind of that chutzpah, it was the first time his friends had ever seen him “truly angry.”
And the rest of us have been dealing with book blurbs ever since.
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