A poet wrote me today to tell me that she was celebrating the Fourth by attending a party devoted to the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I was grateful to hear it, because it led me to a couple early morning hours of contemplative reacquaintence with the work.
A few words on Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass
When Whitman first published Leaves, almost all of its most famous segments had not yet appeared. Yet there was complete, already in the 1855 edition, an idea about what the work would ultimately be, and also what America would ultimately be as well: a place where citizens were both contemplative and active, peaceful and violent, loving and angry. Whatever the poem is, it is certainly enormously prescient about who we are and who we came to be. I hope you'll spend a few minutes with it.