In 1882, the district attorney of Boston contacted the publisher of the most recent edition, claiming that the book was obscene. The controversy over the book’s content continued. Two of its most important poems, ‘O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” were written in 1865 in response to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Unfortunately, Whitman had not gotten Emerson’s permission to quote his letter, and Emerson was not pleased to have unwittingly become a pitchman for Whitman’s work.ĭepending on how you differentiate between a reprinting and a new edition, Leaves of Grass went through somewhere between six and nine editions, growing almost every time. “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” Emerson had written. It included what we would now call a “blurb” taken from Emerson’s letter of praise. The book was well enough received, though, that Whitman issued a greatly expanded edition-up from 96 pages to almost 400-in 1856. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a prominent minister and author of the day, wrote that “it is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.” Whitman was fired from his job at the Department of the Interior because James Harlan, the Secretary of the Interior, was deeply offended by the book. The book’s forthright sensuality, which went so far as to allude to homosexuality, offended many. Whitman later wrote, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering Emerson brought me to a boil.” He sent a copy of that first edition to Emerson, who replied that it was “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.” In “The Poet,” Emerson called for American poets to focus their energy on things that are uniquely American. Whitman had written the book, in part, as a response to an 1844 essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The dozen poems in the 1855 edition included “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric.” The poems themselves were untitled in the first edition, but titles were added in later editions. “Leaves” is another word for “pages,” and “grass” was a publisher’s term for books of little value. The title Leaves of Grass was a self-deprecating pun.
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