In July 1855, a pair of Scottish immigrant brothers, Andrew and Thomas Rome, published about 800 copies of a book of a dozen poems at their Brooklyn Heights printing press. The title of the text, Leaves of Grass, was printed in vine-like gold letters on its rich green front cover, which made no mention of its author, Walt Whitman, a friend of the Rome brothers who had talked them into publishing his book of poetry.
The text was “like no other book that ever was written”, a critic for Life Illustrated claimed at the time. Readers cracked open Leaves of Grass to find an engraved frontispiece of Whitman, his gaze direct, one hand on his hip and the other in his pants pocket, framing an outfit – consisting of a wide-brimmed hat and a loose, unbuttoned shirt – that was unusually bohemian for a member of his contemporary literary class. To some, the text was even more surprising than the image of Whitman's likeness: the author penned the 12 poems in free verse, eschewing traditional standards of rhyme and meter, and addressed his readers directly – and often in the first person – while inquiring ideas about death, democracy, sexuality and the body.
Within weeks of the initial publication, Ralph Waldo Emerson called the text “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed”. And Sara Willis – also known as Fanny Fern, America's first professional female newspaper columnist – praised Whitman's work in her column in the New York Ledger the following year. But outrage over Whitman's frank, sensual literary musings reverberated throughout the following decades among moral fundamentalists: the book got Whitman fired from his job in the Department of the Interior in 1865, and was bannedby the district attorney of Boston in 1882.
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