Image via WikipediaA NOTE ON CENSORSHIP AND RECEPTION OF LEAVES OF GRASS
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Leaves of Grass, while Whitman was alive, never had a peaceful or warm reception in the United States. Trevisan (2001, p.207) noted that Leaves of Grass was “received with hostility by critics and public”, which is attested by the fact that Leaves of Grass was only “properly published” in 1881.[1] Although this 1881 edition had received very good reviews and was selling fairly well, it was censored in Boston by the District Attorney, who “classified Leaves of Grass as obscene literature”, and the publication was discontinued.
There was a “list of changes” from the D.A. that, if accepted by Whitman, would make the publication possible, but the poet replied that “[...] yielding to censorship was a compromise of his principles, and it was not his nature to compromise [...]“. Fortunately, he immediately found another publisher in Philadelphia who “took over” his book and published it, which made them even gain “financially from [the book] being” banned in Boston. The fact is that the form and content of the Leaves did not correspond to the critics’ and public’s literary taste of the nineteenth century. In the D.A.’s “list of changes”, it was necessary that the poems “A Woman Waits for Me” and “Ode to a Common Prostitute” be “omitted altogether”.
It was poems like these two mentioned above that “had offended so many people in the past” and was again to cause Whitman grief and make his works receive “more unfavorable reviews than usual”. But in spite of all his necessities, he would never allow the publication of “expurgated” editions in the U.S. He only accepted such editions overseas, as the one “Rossetti had edited in England” (ALLEN, 1955, p.470).
Actually, in February, 1868, William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919), who was an English writer and critic, the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti (author), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (poet, painter and translator) and Christina Georgina Rossetti (poet), and also one of the seven founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, edited Poems of Walt Whitman in England[2]. In his “reserved” introduction, he was “friendly [but] admitted some faults” in the American bard, like Whitman’s sometimes coarse and evident language, or his vague style, which was compensated by the poet’s “virtues”, such as being an original and masterful writer, one of the best at those times. Whitman was also praised for his defense of a real democracy.
All in all, this collection of poems was so good that it “[...] actually won Whitman more prestige in Great Britain than he had yet received or was to enjoy for some time in his own country.” (ALLEN, 1955, pp.387-8). This publication won Whitman not only prestige, but also support from English writers, who were going to be “of great help to him, personally, financially, and as promoters of his fame.” Until the end of his life he would receive the attention of these loyal friends, who would always assist him in his bad moments. For example, in 1886, there was William Rossetti sending Whitman “[...] funds that [he] had been collecting in England since the previous fall”, from friends and contributors like Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Havelock Ellis, “and about eighty others” (1955, p.524), which proves the human and literary respect and consideration they had for the American poet.
As a consequence of the 1868 edition, in “England and Europe [...] his fame was growing”, Whitman “learned that Adolf Strodmann [poet and translator, 1829-1879] had included some translations of his poems [...] in his Amerikanische Antologie in 1870 [published in Germany].” (ALLEN, 1955, p.430). And in 1872, an article by Rudolf Schmidt was published on him in a Danish magazine, in which he was called the “poet of American democracy” by the author. However, this fame abroad brought him conflicting feelings:
Schmidt was the leading editor and journalist for the socialist party in Denmark, and he was less interested in Whitman’s poetry than in his ideas. Whitman knew only that he had won another warm friend in Europe, and this consoled him at the same time it increased his bitterness over his difficulty in gaining acceptance in his own country. (ALLEN, 1955, p.441)
But this is a fate that many great authors share with Whitman, the fact that they are rejected at home and loved abroad. It is never easy to bring a new or different vision of the world into it, and it takes time, sometimes decades or centuries, for a writer’s works to be accepted. For example, a European contemporary of his, Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867), who was the author of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) and one of the most influential French poets, critics and translators of the nineteenth century, was not appreciated by the public and also had financial troubles later in life. Nevertheless, he translated E. A. Poe’s works into French and was an important influence (after his death) on authors such as Arthur Rimbaud, who called him in a letter ‘the king of poets, a true God’, Stéphane Mallarmé, who wrote a poem titled ‘Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire’, and Marcel Proust, who stated that Baudelaire was the greatest poet of the nineteenth century. Certainly, like Baudelaire, Whitman received more attention from the press and public in the United States after his death, as any biographer of him can testify (Allen is one of them).
[1] This is so because the previous editions never had a publishing house responsible for them. On the following page Allen gives an account of this turning point in Whitman’s literary career: “The Osgood edition of Leaves of Grass, copyrighted 1881 but dated 1881-82 on the title page, was a compact octavo book of 382 pages, bound in gold-colored cloth, with title and design on the backstrip, showing a butterfly resting on the forefinger of a hand, stamped in gold. Whitman had always preferred books that he could carry in his pocket, and requested that the margins be trimmed close to reduce the size of the book. It was still rather large for most pockets, but it was a plain, neatly printed, serviceable, compact volume.” (ALLEN, 1955, pp.495-500).
[2] The 1868 and the 1886 British editions of Leaves of Grass, as well as the first “full-length” Spanish edition, 1912, are available today on the internet at http://www.whitmanarchive.org/index.html. This Walt Whitman Archive, which provides the text of Leaves of Grass in seven historical editions, plus the three above mentioned, is supported by many educational institutions, including the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, the University of Virginia, Duke University, the New York Public Library, the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, etc., and is directed by Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Ed Folsom (University of Iowa). We have exchanged a few messages with Ed Folsom, who gave us some advice on the best annotated edition available of Leaves of Grass. We resort to this Archive as it is a trustful source of information on and by Whitman.
