Walt Whitman

Press

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a letter to Whitman, July 21, 1855

He is apparently the greatest democrat the world has seen.

Henry David Thoreau, in a letter to H. G. O. Blake, November 19, 1856

Well baptized: fresh, hardy, and grown for the masses.

Fanny Fern, New York Ledger, May 10, 1856

…there is such a book, and it is well worth going twice to the bookstore to buy it.

Unsigned, The North American Review, January 1856

…it is impossible to imagine how any man’s fancy could have conceived such a mass of stupid filth…

Rufus W. Griswold, unsigned, The Criterion, November 10, 1855

Whitman gave Emerson’s private letter to the New York Tribune, which printed it on October 10, 1855, without Emerson’s leave; its first line went in gold on the spine of the 1856 edition. In 1860 his publishers, Thayer and Eldridge, gave away Leaves of Grass Imprints, sixty-four pages of what had been said of the first two editions, the hostile with the kind, and some of it his own, unsigned.