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WALT WHITMAN

_Yesterday & Today_

BY

HENRY EDUARD LEGLER




   CHICAGO
   BROTHERS OF THE BOOK
   1916


   COPYRIGHT 1916
   BY THE
   BROTHERS OF THE BOOK


The edition of this book consists of six hundred copies on this
Fabriano hand-made paper, and the type distributed.

This copy is Number 2


   TO DR. MAX HENIUS

   CONSISTENT HATER OF SHAMS
   ARDENT LOVER OF ALL OUTDOORS
   AND GENEROUS GIVER OF SELF
   IN GENUINE FELLOWSHIP

   THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED




_Walt Whitman: Yesterday & Today_




I


On a day about mid-year in 1855, the conventional literary world was
startled into indecorous behavior by the unannounced appearance of a
thin quarto sheaf of poems, in form and in tone unlike anything of
precedent issue. It was called Leaves of Grass, and there were but
twelve poems in the volume. No author's name appeared upon the title
page, the separate poems bore no captions, there was no imprint of
publisher. A steel engraving of a man presumably between thirty and
forty years of age, coatless, shirt flaringly open at the neck, and a
copyright notice identifying Walter Whitman with the publication,
furnished the only clues. Uncouth in size, atrociously printed, and
shockingly frank in the language employed, the volume evoked such a
tirade of rancorous condemnation as perhaps bears no parallel in the
history of letters. From contemporary criticisms might be compiled an
Anthology of Anathema comparable to Wagner's Schimpf-Lexicon, or the
Dictionary of Abuse suggested by William Archer for Henrik Ibsen. Some
of the striking adjectives and phrases employed in print would include
the following, as applied either to the verses or their author:

   The slop-bucket of Walt Whitman.
   A belief in the preciousness of filth.
   Entirely bestial.
   Nastiness and animal insensibility to shame.
   Noxious weeds.
   Impious and obscene.
   Disgusting burlesque.
   Broken out of Bedlam.
   Libidinousness and swell of self-applause.
   Defilement.
   Crazy outbreak of conceit and vulgarity.
   Ithyphallic audacity.
   Gross indecency.
   Sunken sensualist.
   Rotten garbage of licentious thoughts.
   Roots like a pig.
   Rowdy Knight Errant.
   A poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils.
   Its liberty is the wildest license; its love the essence of
     the lowest lust!
   Priapus--worshipping obscenity.
   Rant and rubbish.
   Linguistic silliness.
   Inhumanly insolent.
   Apotheosis of Sweat.
   Mouthings of a mountebank.
   Venomously malignant.
   Pretentious twaddle.
   Degraded helot of literature.
   His work, like a maniac's robe, bedizened with fluttering
     tags of a thousand colors.
   Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through
     every field of lascivious thought.
   Muck of abomination.

A few quotations from the press of this period will serve to indicate
the general tenor of comment:

"The book might pass for merely hectoring and ludicrous, if it were
not something a great deal more offensive," observed the Christian
Examiner (Boston, 1856). "It openly deifies the bodily organs, senses,
and appetites in terms that admit of no double sense. The author is
'one of the roughs, a Kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, sensual, divine
inside and out. The scent of these armpits an aroma finer than
prayer.' He leaves 'washes and razors for foofoos,' thinks the talk
about virtue and vice only 'blurt,' he being above and indifferent to
both of them. These quotations are made with cautious delicacy. We
pick our way as cleanly as we can between other passages which are
more detestable."

In columns of bantering comment, after parodying his style of
all-inclusiveness, the United States Review (1855) characterizes Walt
Whitman thus: "No skulker or tea-drinking poet is Walt Whitman. He
will bring poems to fill the days and nights--fit for men and women
with the attributes of throbbing blood and