WHITMAN, Walt.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Leaves of Grass. First trade edition, first printing, first issue. Enlarged with 124 new poems, this edition prints for the first time the 45 "Calamus" poems (pp. 341-78), Whitman's most direct expressions of homosexual love, and the 15 sexually charged "Children of Adam" poems.Whitman began preparing for this edition in 1857, following the two privately printed editions of 1855 and 1856, but no substantial work began until February 1860, when the Boston publishers Thayer and Eldridge purchased the copyright. When Whitman travelled to Boston the following month to oversee the typesetting, he met Emerson, whose endorsement he had printed on the spine of the second edition, and Emerson tried unsuccessfully to persuade Whitman to remove the erotic poems from the volume. It was subsequently printed without any prefaces or reviews, and "at last stood on its own 'with no other matter but poems', as Whitman had promised Sarah Tyndale in 1857, 'no letters to or from Emerson - no notices, or any thing of that sort'. For the first time it had organic unity and canonical finality as a theory of art and a sort of whole duty of man for the ninteenth century and after" (Kaplan, p. 250).The first printing, comprising 1,000 copies, was published in May 1860 and sold out within a month. This copy is from the first, American issue; there was also a British issue, distinguished by a London imprint mounted on the title page. After the publishers went bankrupt, the electrotype plates were sold at

• Printing: first

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