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CALAMUS AND CHILDREN OF ADAM
Calamus, a group of poems about "manly love," first appears in the 1860 edition. Whitman seemed to be at work on these poems almost immediately after the 1856 edition. He set thirteen of them in print in 1858. Whitman liked to work on his poems when they were in print rather than in manuscript; he often would set poems in type, then begin to revise them. He conceived of his poetry for the masses, and he like to see them and think about them in the form the masses would see them in. (Keep in mind, too, that a really practical typewriter wasn't invented until the late 1860s, and wasn't generally available until the late 1870s.) It's illuminating to know, then, that he did work on some of the Calamus poems only in manuscript. For awhile he called his manuscript series "Live Oak, with Moss," then "Calamus-Leaves." In these manuscripts, Whitman carefully numbered a series of twelve poems, which form a single coherent group that ells an interesting story (Gay Wilson Allen suggests comparing them to an Elizabethan sonnet sequence). In the 1860 edition, other poems were added to these twelve (there are 45 total); more changes occurred after that, and the 1881 edition contains 39 Calamus poems.
But it is fascinating to go back and read those twelve manuscript poems in their original order. They are now available in facsimile manuscript and transcribed on the Whitman Archive, available here. As you’ll see, Whitman carefully numbered the manuscript poems as if he knew they told an intimate story, then he scrambled them and mixed them in with the other poems when he printed them, as if he wanted to hide, or disguise, the story. For a detailed textual history of the sequence, see Fredson Bowers, Whitman's Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass, 1860 (1955). You can recreate the original sequence (but be aware that the published versions are different from the manuscript versions). Read the poems in this order (given with their 1881 titles):
I: #14 (Not Heat Flames Up)
II: #20 (I Saw in Louisiana)
III: #11 (When I Heard at the Close of Day)
IV: #23 (This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful)
V: #8 [Only appears in 1860 ed.]
VI: #32 (What Think You I Take My Pen in Hand)
VII: #10 (Recorders Ages Hence)
VIII: #9 [Only appears in 1860 ed.]
IX: #34 (I Dream'd in a Dream)
X: #43 (O You Whom I Often and Silently Come)
XI: #36 (Earth My Likeness)
XII: #42 (To a Western Boy)
Whitman always seemed somewhat defensive about the meaning of the Calamus group, insisting that the poems were political, not personal, in nature. But he also conceived of the Children of Adam poems as some sort of balance to Calamus; he wrote, "Theory of Cluster of Poems the same to the passion of Woman-Love as the Calamus-Leaves are to adhesiveness, manly love."
Read Calamus and Children of Adam together, carefully, in the 1860 and the final editions. They are the two groups of poems that always seemed to get Whitman in trouble; Emerson tried to talk Whitman out of publishing the Children of Adam poems, citing moral and financial reasons. In 1881 it was the Children of Adam poems that especially raised the ire of the "Society for the Suppression of Vice" in Boston, and got Leaves banned. And, of course, in the past half-century it has been the Calamus poems that people have turned to, often with strong homophobic feelings, in order to raise the issue of Whitman's sexual preferences.
The New England Society for the Suppression of Vice (affiliated with anti-obscenity campaigner Anthony Comstock's infamous New York outfit) complained to the Massachusetts Attorney-General about the availability of Leaves after its Boston sales had gotten off to a good start. On March 1, 1882, the District Attorney of Boston, Oliver Stevens, wrote to Whitman's Boston publishers (James R. Osgood & Co.) and advised them that Leaves of Grass fell "within the provisions of the Public Statutes respecting obscene literature" and advised Osgood to "withdraw" and "suppress" the book. Osgood was understandably concerned and wrote to Whitman asking him to allow them to prepare a new edition "lacking the obnoxious features." Later in March, Whittman received from Osgood the list of passages that the District Attorney had demanded be "expunged" from Leaves; it was, Whitman said, a "curious list":
1. "Song of Myself": Section 3, lines 23-24; Section 5, lines 6-9; Section 11, lines 14-15; Section 24, lines 16, 24-25, 36, 45; all of Section 28; Section 33, "I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself, / I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips"; Section 40, lines 20-21.
2. "From Pent-Up Aching Rivers," lines 4-5, lines 23 to the end of poem.
3. "I Sing the Body Electric," Section 5, ll. 6 through the next-to-last line; Section 9, lines 15, 30.
4. "A Woman Waits for Me," entire poem.
5. "Spontaneous Me," lines 10-end of poem.
6. "Native Moments," lines 1-7.
7. "The Dalliance of Eagles," entire poem.
8. "By Blue Ontario's Shore," Section 6, lines 7-8.
9. "To a Common Prostitute," entire poem.
10. "Unfolded Out of the Folds," lines 6-7.
11. "The Sleepers," Section 1, line 11 (after first clause); Section 7, lines 36-37.
12. "Faces," Section 4, lines 18-end of section.
Whitman responded on March 23 by sending a copy of Leaves marked with the emendations he would agree to; this copy has been lost, but the poems for which he agreed to minor changes were limited to "I Sing the Body Electric," "A Woman Waits for Me," and "Spontaneous Me." Osgood responded by saying "the official mind" would not be satisfied with Whitman's small changes and demanded that all of "A Woman" and "Common Prostitute" be omitted. On April 10, Osgood wrote to Whitman that the District Attorney indeed did not find Whitman's alterations acceptable: "Therefore as your views seem to be irreconcilable with those of the official authorities there seems no alternative for us but to decline to further circulate the book." In May Whitman received from Osgood a payment of $100 and all "the plates, sheets, dies, &c. of ‘Leaves of Grass.’." Whitman had some of the sheets bound and sold them, and in June he signed an agreement with Rees Welsh & Co. in Philadelphia to publish Leaves from the Osgood plates. Rees Welsh printed five different impressions of Leaves by October--the Boston banning had generated publicity and sales, by one estimate totalling between two and three thousand copies in one day! David McKay, who worked for Rees Welsh, then took over publication and became Whitman's friend and strong supporter.
Meanwhile a former minister named George Chainey decided to test the statutes by having "To a Common Prostitute" printed as a supplement to his journal This World, then asking the Boston postmaster to rule on whether it could be sent through the mails. The postmaster, named Tobey, impounded the materials and waited for a ruling from the US Postmaster General, who, urged on by Whitman's fiery supporter W. D. O'Connor and his friend Col. Robert Ingersoll, ruled in effect that Leaves was literature--accepted by the public, issued by a respectable publisher, housed in libraries, admired by prominent people--and therefore not ruled by "the statutes respecting taboo matter." By July William O'Connor was writing to Whitman about how Leaves would now "pass unmolested through the mails," though the Boston postmaster refused to release the printed copies of "Prostitute," and an anonymous brave assistant finally started them through the mails without permission. The whole controversy stirred up O'Connor, who rose once again to his early Good Gray Poet rhetorical heat and attacked everyone having to do with the suppression, including Boston postmaster Tobey (O'Connor's article on him was called "Tobey or Not Tobey") and Comstock himself, who in 1882 kept the issue hot by having Ezra Heywood, a radical free-love reformer, arrested for publishing "Common Prostitute" and "A Woman Waits" in his journal The Word. Heywood was exonerated in 1883, and Leaves was finally out of legal danger.
See The Correspondence, vol. 5, for letters and annotations dealing with this matter. See Allen, Solitary Singer, pp. 496-500 for a concise narrative of the events. The most thorough examination of the controversy, complete with substantial documentation, is Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs: Comrades (1931), chapter 13 ("Suppression of Leaves of Grass"). Florence Freedman's William Douglas O'Connor: Walt Whitman's Chosen Knight (1985) investigates the events in detail from O'Connor's perspective (chapter 17).
Handy Reference Guide to Editions of Leaves of Grass:
·1855: First
·1856: Second
·1860-61: Third
·1867: Fourth
·1871: Fifth
·1881: Sixth
·1891: Sixth again, but with the poetry from November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy added as annexes ("Sands at Seventy" and "Good-Bye My Fancy." This is the edition Whitman authorized for all future reprintings.
Whitman Collection in the University of Iowa Library Special Collections:
Leaves of Grass. First edition. 1855. S. Weir Mitchell's copy. yfPS 3201 1855
Leaves of Grass. Second edition. 1856. With Emerson's statement gold-embossed as a spinal blurb. xPS 3201 1856.
Leaves of Grass. 3rd edition (third printing). 1860-61. xPS 3201 1860a
Leaves of Grass. Pirated third edition. Three
copies, each a slightly different issue.
xPS 3201 1860aa
Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps. 1865. Sequel to Drum-Taps bound in. xPS 3211 A1 1865
Leaves of Grass. 4th edition. 1867. Third printing (with Songs Before Parting); Fourth printing (with Songs Before Parting and Drum-Taps). XPS 3201 1867
Poems by Walt Whitman. Selected and edited by William Michael Rossetti. London: 1868. First British edition. xPS 3203 R6
After All, Not to Create Only. 1871. Became "Song of the Exposition." xPS 3219 A1 1871
As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free. 1872. Became "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood." xPS 3207 A1 1872
Democratic Vistas. 1871. Original paperback issue. x973d W61d
Leaves of Grass. 1872. Second printing of 1871 edition. With Passage to India bound in at end. T.W. Rolleston's copy with his marginalia. xPS 3201 1872a
Two Rivulets. With signed photo of Whitman. 1876. Sold as volume 2 of Author's Edition of Complete Works. xPS 3222 T8
Leaves of Grass. 1881-82. 6th edition. James R. Osgood Boston edition. xPS 3201 1881
Leaves of Grass. 1882. Reprint of Boston 6th edition, this one done in Philadelphia. Two copies of Rees Welsh edition; 2 copies of David McKay edition. xPS 3201 1881a
Leaves of Grass. 1884. Reprint. xPS 3201 1884b
Specimen Days and Collect. 1882-83. First edition of Collect. xPS 3220 A1 1882.
November Boughs. 1888. Companion volume to Goodbye My Fancy. Signed by Horace Traubel. Two printings: green binding with no portrait; maroon binding with portrait. xPS 3217 A1 1888
Complete Poems and Prose of Walt Whitman, 1855-88. Handled byWhitman. xPS 3200 E88
Leaves of Grass, with Sands at Seventy. 1888. Autographed. xPS 3201 1889
Goodbye My Fancy. 2nd Annex to Leaves of Grass. 1891. Prose and poetry. Matching volume to 1888 November Boughs: two printings: green binding with no portrait; maroon binding with portrait. xPS 3214 A1 1891
Leaves of Grass. Including Sands at Seventy, 1st annex, Goodbye My Fancy, 2nd annex. 1891-92. The authorized text, called the "deathbed" edition. First printing. xPS 3201 1889
New York Dissected. Newspaper articles from Life Illustrated (Whitman's writings for a phrenological journal). xF128.44 W56
Autobiographia, or, The Story of a Life, by Walt Whitman. Selected from his prose writings. Edited by Arthur Stedman. 1892. xPS 3231 A5
Whitman Letters in the Ms. collection:
1. June 22, 1877, to John Burroughs. MsL W615b.
2. February 8, 1884, a request to Whitman with his response on the back. Lebold Collection.
3. April 3, 1884, letter from John Burroughs. x091.5 A939 v. 3.
4. June 12, 1884, asking for money. x091.5 A939 v. 5 no. 101.
Notes on Some of the Books in the Iowa Collection:
1855 (First) Edition:
Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass was a self-publication. No publisher was interested in producing what seemed an odd and inelegant group of twelve untitled poems. So Whitman did it himself: he designed the cover, chose the paper and binding, and set some of the type himself. He chose an oversize-format to allow for his long, absorptive poetic lines to flow across the page, making room for a poetry as spacious as the expanding American nation. Whitman believed that American poetry would have to be essentially different from any poetry written previously-it would have to look different, sound different, and deal with different subject matter if it was to guide the development of a radical new American democracy. So he designed his book to look unlike any previous book of poetry, and the binding was a key element of his innovation.
Whitman chose a dark green ribbed morocco cloth to suggest the organic nature of the poetry, and his title set up a pun on "leaves"-the leaves (or pages) of this book would be like leaves of grass, hearty and alive, growing everywhere, a poetry of the outdoors, rooted in the soil of America. He designed the stamping on the cover: he goldstamped the lush letters of "Leaves of Grass," with the very letters of the title sprouting roots and leaves, and he surrounded the title with blindstamped foliage buried in the morocco green but prominently goldstamped on the spine. It is a book whose cover insists on an organic understanding of literature, with words rooted in nature, with language as abundant as grass. And just as striking as the fertile letters of his title are the letters that are missing on the cover-the letters of the author's name. It would not be until the third edition that Whitman would allow his name to appear on either the cover or the title page: these books, he wanted to emphasize, were written by a representative American who spoke for the vast variety of the nation. America's new poetry, he believed, would not be written by a traditional poet, proud of his authority, but rather by a rough representative of the great democratic average, who gained his authority by speaking the language of the masses. So, facing the title page, Whitman included an engraving of a daguerreotype of himself, a full-body portrait, with working clothes and hat on. This is a poetry, the portrait seemed to say, that comes from the body as much as from the mind, that emerges from the working classes instead of from the educated aristocrats.
Because he did not have much money, Whitman had copies of the 1855 edition bound on at least five different occasions from June 1855 to January 1856, producing another group of books whenever he had the cash, and he was forced to use increasingly cheaper bindings and finishing methods. The University of Iowa copy, with the goldstamped triple-rule frame and gilded edges, is an example of the first and most expensive binding. For the second binding, Whitman gave up some of the goldstamping and the gilded edges, and then, for the final binding, he used a cheap and plain paper wrapper, with no decorations. Fewer than 800 copies of the edition were printed.
All originality owes something to predecessors, though, and Whitman clearly borrowed the conception of his cover design from a very popular book that appeared just two years earlier, called Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio, by Sara Payson Willis (better known as Fanny Fern), a friend of Whitman and an admirer of his work. Fern Leaves was a collection of character sketches and proto-feminist essays, and it featured on its green cover a goldstamped title, with "Fern Leaves" composed of letters sprouting roots and leaves. Whitman borrowed Willis's idea and compounded the effect, almost disguising his letters in organic imagery.
1856 (Second) Edition:
Within a year of publishing Leaves of Grass, Whitman was already reconceptualizing his book, and he would continue to do so his whole life. Each edition of Leaves is essentially a different book, not just another version of the same book. For his 1856 edition, Whitman added twenty new poems to the original twelve. But as the book grew in number of poems, it shrank in page size; the paper for this edition is less than half the size of that of the first edition. As in the first edition, no publisher appears in this edition, but the book was in fact printed by Fowler and Wells, a combination phrenology firm, bookseller, and publisher, for whom Whitman had worked. Fowler and Wells distributed the first edition, and, while they in effect published the second edition, they still did not want their names appearing in such a controversial work.
This edition demonstrates Whitman's changing attitudes toward his book and toward the goals he had for his work. He quickly gave up his desire to have spacious pages that would easily accommodate his long and flowing lines, and instead he shrank the book to a "pocket-size" edition. His dream now was to have working people carry his poetry with them and read it during breaks: "to put a book in your pocket and off to the seashore or the forest-that is an ideal pleasure." So he created a book that he hoped would "go into any reasonable pocket," something the first edition clearly would not do. What he ended up with, however, was what he called "the chunky fat book," its cramped pages and tight margins forcing the poet to break his lines frequently so that they fit on the page. About a thousand copies of this edition were printed.
This edition also manifests Ralph Waldo Emerson's influence on Whitman. Whitman owed a great deal to the great Concord writer and philosopher, whose essay "The Poet" seemed in many ways to prophesy Walt Whitman (some critics would argue that Whitman simply modeled himself on Emerson's essay). Whitman reportedly said that by the mid-1850s he was "simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil." If that is true, then this edition is the most furious roiling of the waters. Whitman here prints the supportive letter that Emerson had sent him after reading the 1855 Leaves (a letter that Whitman immediately had reprinted in the New York Tribune), prints his own twelve-page response to Emerson (addressing him as "Master"), and brazenly features Emerson's name and endorsement on the spine of the book. Whitman carefully sketched out plans for the spine, figuring precisely how he wanted to position the carefully selected words from Emerson's letter: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." This statement appears in gold letters, followed by "R. W. Emerson." (On most remaining copies of the 1856 edition, the gilding on this statement and on Emerson's name have long since worn off, but on the Iowa copy it is remarkably intact.) Whitman used this emblazoned blurb without Emerson's permission (initiating a controversy that rages to this day), and Emerson, for his part, reluctantly learned to accept such behavior from Whitman (when Emerson loaned his copy of the 1856 edition to a friend, he said that "the inside was worthy [of] attention even though it came from one capable of so misusing the cover").
The cover is a miniature version of the 1855 cover, still green with blindstamped foliage, but now with an unornamented and inorganic "Leaves of Grass" on the front cover. On the spine, however, the "a" in "Grass" and the "m" in "Whitman" both sprout leaves, and Whitman's sketches for the spine show him playfully pulling roots out of the letters of his title.
1860 (Third) Edition:
Whitman had been prolific in his composition of new poems after the 1856 edition, and by the time he issued his third edition in 1860, there were 146 new poems, and many of the previous poems had undergone extensive revision. For the first time, Whitman's "Calamus" poems appear, a cluster devoted to male-male affection, along with "Enfans d'Adam," later renamed "Children of Adam," a group of poems dealing with male-female attraction.
This is the first edition of Leaves published by a true publisher. Thayer and Eldridge, a new but already very reputable Boston publisher specializing in abolitionist texts, had written to Whitman in February 1860, saying that they wanted to publish the next edition of his poems. Whitman, of course, was pleased with this development, and-to the surprise of his new publishers-he promptly went to Boston to oversee the typesetting and printing of the book; he always took a very active role in all aspects of his books' production. At this time, he walked with Emerson on the Boston Commons, and the Concord sage tried to convince Whitman that he needed to remove the "Enfans d'Adam" poems, both because they were immoral and because they would hurt the book financially. Whitman refused to delete any of his poems.
The Thayer and Eldridge edition is a big book--456 pages--and it has the feel of a monumental work, something Whitman was by this point trying consciously to produce. He had been writing in his notes about his desire to create "the New Bible," a Bible for American democracy that would reconfigure morality on radically democratic terms. In his own working copy of the 1860 edition of Leaves, Whitman carefully noted the number of words in the Bible (895,752), the number of words in the New Testament (212,000), and the number of words in the "Boston ed. Leaves of Grass" (150,500). To this total, he added the words in his new book of Civil War poems, Drum-Taps (33,000), giving him a total of 183,500, an impressive amount of verbiage, but still quite a ways from overtaking his ancient rival.
This edition gives up the green binding. Whitman bound the 1860 book in several different bindings--from yellowish brown to reddish orange. On the front cover "Leaves of Grass" appears blindstamped around a blindstamped globe, revealing the Western hemisphere, floating in clouds. The letters of "Leaves of Grass" have stylized roots or vines emerging from the "L" and "G." On the spine, "Leaves of Grass" is goldstamped, and at the bottom of the spine is the name "Walt Whitman," blindstamped as if to suggest that the poet still had some reticence about trumpeting his individual identity; it is the first time his name appeared on a cover. Above the name is a blindstamped hand with a butterfly perched on a pointing finger; this emblem of the union of man and nature, of the body and the soul, reappears several times in the book, and some years later Whitman brought the figure to life by posing for a photograph with a fake butterfly perched on his thumb.
Thayer and Eldridge unfortunately went out of business by the end of 1860, and their projected long relationship with Whitman never materialized. They sold the plates of the 1860 edition at auction, and the book was sold in pirated editions for the rest of Whitman's life. Whitman would not have a commercial publisher again for twenty years.
1881 (Sixth) Edition:
Whitman, now financing his own publishing, was forced to print and bind the fifth (1867) and sixth (1871-72) editions of Leaves as cheaply as possible, and the covers are thus relatively plain. But by 1881, when Whitman prepared his sixth and final arrangement of his poems, he once again had a well-known Boston publisher, this time James R. Osgood and Company, a firm who counted Henry James and William Dean Howells among its stable of writers. As he had done in 1860, Whitman went to Boston to oversee the printing of the book and attend to the details of typeface, paper size, and binding. He told Osgood that he wanted the book to be "markedly plain & simple even to Quakerness"; it was to be, he said, "a well made book for honest wear & use & carrying with you."
This time, Whitman's name appears twice on the binding, once in a goldstamped framed facsimile autograph on the front cover, and again on the spine, where the name forms the very ground of the "Leaves of Grass" that appear above his name in both words and visual emblems. As with the earlier editions, Whitman plays out the pun of his title, with the title letters formed out of and surrounded by leaves of grass, their roots visible below his name. And on down the spine is Whitman's beloved hand and butterfly emblem, now with the butterfly-soul appearing on the verge of taking leave of the body-hand-Whitman, still suffering the aftereffects of a stroke, was now convinced his life was near its end. The odd yellowish-olive cast of the cover cloth suggests autumn now instead of the summer-green of the first two editions, and the tall grass on the spine looks like hay ready for the harvest.
Hardly had this edition appeared when the Boston District Attorney ruled Leaves obscene and banned it from the mails. Whitman refused to expurgate the edition, and so Osgood was forced to abandon it and gave the plates to Whitman, who used them to print his own author's edition and then entered into an arrangement with Philadelphia publisher Rees Welsh and Company, who issued the book in 1882. David McKay, a Philadelphia publisher who took over the Rees Welsh firm, then issued fifteen more reprintings of the book in various forms. Whitman never again created a new edition of Leaves, though he did add two "annexes" and repackaged the book in different ways. In part because of the "banned in Boston" scandal, the 1881 edition sold better than any previous edition of Leaves.
1889 Reprinting of Sixth Edition:
One of the most interesting and rarest reprintings of the 1881 edition is the fourteenth printing, a special edition issued in honor of Whitman's 70th birthday in 1889. Only 300 copies were printed, and Whitman signed the title page of each one. Whitman's old dream of creating a New Bible once again takes precedence here, as he chooses "Oxford Bible paper" and a fancy Biblical black leather cover with a tongued flap. This edition has the look and feel of a Bible, and Whitman's choice of the relatively straightforward front-cover goldstamped printing of the title and his facsimile signature removes much of the playfulness of the earlier covers. This book bespeaks a new seriousness and earnestness and enfolds Whitman's radical poetics in a very traditional cover. The lush marbled endpapers even contain an accordianed pocket so the reader could store exegetical notes.
It is conceivable that Whitman picked up his long lines, his powerful rhythms, and his poetic cataloging techniques from the Bible, but his language in the early editions had been fresh and colloquial and unbiblical. Increasingly after the Civil War, though, Whitman's poetic diction became more Biblical and latinate, and lines like "O soul thou pleasest me, I thee," became more common. His strategies for reaching a broad American readership had changed: now no longer a fellow worker speaking to his comrades in their everyday language, Whitman by the end of his life had become the revered "Good Gray Poet," looking more and more like a Biblical prophet, and binding his book in Biblical black.
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