Leaves of Grass

The one-hundredth publication of the Arion Press is a handset deluxe limited edition of the text in the famed 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. It contains just a dozen poems, the first, later titled “Song of Myself”, so long it takes up more than half the pages devoted to poetry, and Whitman’s prose preface, so poetical he reused many phrases in later poems as Leaves of Grass expanded to the “death-bed edition” of 1891-92.

For the occasion of the press’s one-hundredth publication, publisher Andrew Hoyem has chosen this most American of texts. “A holy book of the nation, along with the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence,” is how poet laureate Robert Hass describes Leaves of Grass. The appearance of this book of poems in the middle of the nineteenth century was revolutionary. No one had ever read poetry like this before. Ralph Waldo Emerson was so astonished and impressed that he wrote the thirty-five-year-old Whitman what must be the mash note of all time: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.”

To explicate the text of the 1855 first edition Leaves of Grass and establish its importance to literary history, Arion Press invited Helen Vendler, the distinguished Harvard professor and eminent critic of poetry, to write an introductory essay. 

Publisher Hoyem chose Leaves of Grass in part as a tribute to his predecessors Edwin and Robert Grabhorn, whose masterpiece was their 1930 edition of the Whitman poem. “I thought Arion Press might do something with Whitman’s poetry that was different as to the text and yet pay tribute to the 1930 edition by using a similar format, production methods, and materials, but with a new design,” Hoyem writes in the prospectus for this new edition.