lust, run rampant and
holding high revel in its shame."

And the London Lancet, July 7, 1860, comments in this wise: "Of all
the writers we have ever perused, Walt Whitman is the most silly, the
most blasphemous, and the most disgusting. If we can think of any
stronger epithets, we will print them in a second edition."

II

What were these poems which excited such vitriolic epithets? Taking
both the editions of 1855 and of the year following, and indeed
including all of the four hundred poems bearing Whitman's authorship
in the three-quarters of a half-century during which his final volume
was in the making, scarcely half a dozen poems can be found which
could give offense to the most prudish persons. Nearly all of these
have been grouped, with some others, under the general sub-title
Children of Adam. There are poems which excite the risibles of some
readers, there are poems which read like the lists of a mail-order
house, and others which appear in spots to have been copied bodily
from a gazetteer. These, however, are more likely to provoke
good-natured banter than violent denunciatory passion. Even Ralph
Waldo Emerson, whose generous greeting and meed of praise in the
birth-year of Leaves of Grass will be recalled, in sending a copy of
it to Carlyle in 1860, and commending it to his interest, added: "And
after you have looked into it, if you think, as you may, that it is
only an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse, you can light your pipe
with it."

Had Whitman omitted the few poems whose titles are given here,
doubtless a few readers would have found his formless verses either
curious or ludicrous, or merely stupid, and others would have passed
them by as unmeriting even casual attention. The poems which are
chiefly responsible for a controversy which raged for half a century,
are these:

I sing the body electric.
A woman waits for me.
To a common prostitute.
The dalliance of the eagles.

Wholly dissociated from the picturesque personality from which the
book emanated, Leaves of Grass bears a unique story margined on its
pages. The sprawling types whose muddy imprint on the ill-proportioned
pages made up the uncouth first edition of the book, were put together
by the author's hands, and the sorry press work was his handiwork as
well. The unusual preface and the twelve poems that followed he wrote
in the open, while lounging on the wharves, while crossing on
ferry-boats, while loiteri