July 4, 1855: Leaves of Grass published

Happy Fourth of July! The United States of America formally declared its independence from Great Britain on this day 239 years ago.

I’m going a different route today, however, one that ties more closely with my love of the history of my adopted home, Brooklyn.

On this day in 1855, Walt Whitman published his first edition of Leaves of Grass, which Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.”

Whitman published just 795 copies of the first edition, at his own expense. They are incredibly valuable today: last year, one sold at auction for $305,000.

I wrote a bit more about Whitman in 2013 at my now-dormant blog on Brooklyn neighborhoods, The Weekly Nabe; you can read that post here. In particular, I am jealous of The New Yorker‘s detective work in figuring out which building Whitman uses as a base of operations when he wrote the masterpiece.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite passages from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

I too lived—Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island*, and bathed in the waters around it;
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.

*Ed. note: grr

Image: first edition in Wesleyan University’s collection.