News — GeorgeWhitman

Walt Whitman did all he could to advance the fortunes of his own book, Leaves of Grass. He reviewed it himself, not once but three times. “An American Bard at last,” he crowed. Whitman, the New Yorker, was commercially minded. Quickly, he got to work on a new edition. He wrote more poems and published them a year later in the edition of 1856. This volume is short and squat, a quarto, not an expansive folio like the 1855. It looks to be loaded with compact muscle. Whitman did something memorable to the 1856 volume, which he published himself, something...