Who should define "propriety"? James Joyce's Ulysses has been banned, bowdlerized, bootlegged, and burned. Objections to this stream-of-consciousness novel have included that the book contains "dirty language" and "promote[s] lust. This legal battle substantially altered the judicial system in censorship cases.
The law was expanded to include a consideration of the whole work, rather than just controversial passages. As such, the court upheld the artistic merit of Ulysses and found the "obscene" parts germane to the story.
Hemingway was asked to remove the words "damn," "bitch," and "balls" from The Sun Also Rises. He complied, somewhat, altering some of the words. He typeset ten pages or so of it himself. The poet was Walt Whitman and the book was Leaves of Grass. By the time of Whitman's death, the small book had gone through eight editions and grown fivefold in size.
On the sesquicentennial of the book's publication, Leaves of Grass has undergone another significant change, moving from the printed page to digital form on the Walt Whitman Archive. From the very beginning, Whitman foresaw a grand scale for the book. He invoked the tradition of Homer and Virgil in putting the history, politics, and culture of the nation-state to verse.
He learns the lesson. Whitman looked to the Americans whirring around him for inspiration, perceiving "a teeming nation of nations" that anticipated its centuries-long prominence.
By listening to the meter of everyday life, Americans could understand their past, experience their present, and anticipate their future. Whitman's conviction that America and its citizens were poems in and of themselves echoed the zeitgeist of mid-nineteenth-century America that sought to eradicate the lingering influences of Europe by defining a distinctly American idiom and literature.
During this American Renaissance, as it came to be known, authors and philosophers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Emerson assessed the nation's brief history in their writings and summarily expressed a national identity. Of all of them, it was Whitman, who, with his barbaric yawp, was the most radical in avowing that American identity was inextricable from the nation's central premise of self-governance and equality. In poems such as "Song of Myself," he stressed to his readers how their individual lives constituted the very circumference of democracy.
He would say this in different ways over the next twenty-seven years. Despite its prominence, however, the edition of the book being memorialized this year is one with which most readers are largely unfamiliar. Comprised of a ten-page preface in prose and twelve poems, six titled "Leaves of Grass," the others untitled, this ninety-five-page first edition was just the beginning of what became a lifelong project for the poet.
By the time of Whitman's death in March , Leaves of Grass had grown to a staggering poems printed on pages. Whitman made some of these revisions for logistical reasons, breaking single lines into two or three to fit the dimensions of the paper used by the Rome brothers, who helped print the first edition. Folsom notes that the Romes owned a small publishing house that primarily printed legal forms and reports for the city of Brooklyn.
While we've always had this discussion that Whitman chose this large size of paper for the first edition because he wanted to let his lines flow across the page, people would be sort of up against it when they had to explain the second edition—which is a very small edition—in which Whitman didn't seem to think twice about breaking every line he wrote sometimes even three or four times.
We may be looking at a choice of convenience. Folsom, who, along with Ken Price, the Hillegass Professor of American Literature at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, codirects the archive, says that examining the different editions helps to debunk the long-held belief that Leaves of Grass was a single-evolving text whose overall meaning was little changed by the poet's constant revising.
Of the nine editions that existed in the poet's lifetime, six were so unlike their predecessors that some scholars have described them as individual books altogether. Until recently, the different editions were scattered among the special collections of a handful of libraries. The launch of The Walt Whitman Archive in made these editions more accessible to the public, allowing users to explore materials including facsimiles and transcriptions of all the editions of Leaves of Grass published before Whitman's death, contemporary reviews of the book, selected poetry manuscripts, and various photographs of the poet.
Since that time, the archive has grown to include Whitman's complete prose works, current literary criticism about his poems, background on his many disciples, and even a digital audio file of what is thought to be the poet reading his poem "America. Remarkably, Whitman's name appears nowhere on the title page of the first edition of Leaves of Grass , which the poet, a former printer's devil and journalist, self-published.
Other than the "Walter Whitman" that appeared in the copyright information and the reference to a "Walt Whitman, an American" in the book's first poem, there were no other clues to his identity. This "carpenter portrait," as critics have called it, depicted the author as a working-class man, whose plain manner and informal sartorial style departed from the stodgy conventions of nineteenth-century authorship.
Beyond the engraving, Whitman's informal style carried over into his poetry, which he wrote in free verse and peppered with American slang. The preface that opened the edition of Leaves of Grass responded to Emerson's essay, "The Poet. From an unpublished introduction to Leaves of Grass, wherein Whitman notes that some poems may "shock" the reader MA For more information about this item, click here. The Leon Levy Foundation is generously underwriting a major project to upgrade catalog records for the Morgan's collection of literary and historical manuscripts.
The project is the most substantive effort to date to improve primary research information on a portion of this large and highly important collection.
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