Walt Whitman's First Fan Mail
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2022
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
July 21, 1855. Literary lion Ralph Waldo Emerson writes a letter to an unknown Brooklyn journalist named Walt Whitman. He’s just read Whitman’s first published poems, which have both startled him and caused him to rejoice. Emerson congratulates the poet on having produced “the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed.” So why, just five years later, will Emerson be urging him to delete the “scandalous” passages from a new edition of the poems? And how did Walt Whitman’s exuberant sensuality help recast America’s relationship to the body?
Special thanks to our guests, Karen Karbiener, professor of literature at NYU and president of the Walt Whitman Initiative, and Jerome Loving, author of Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse and Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Karbiener published a new edition of Whitman’s Live Oak, With Moss poems along with illustrator Brian Selznick. You can find out more about the Walt Whitman Initiative’s programming, including efforts to preserve the Whitman home at 99 Ryerson Street, on their website: WaltWhitmanInitiative.org.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, Original Podcast. |
| 0:04.3 | History this week, June 21st, 1855. |
| 0:13.2 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:15.7 | About 10 days ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson read something new, |
| 0:21.3 | a self-published manuscript by an unknown Brooklyn journalist, |
| 0:25.6 | which you might think would be beneath Emerson's notice. |
| 0:28.8 | He is at this time the King of American Letters. |
| 0:34.4 | But Emerson reads a lot. His house, as it's preserved today, |
| 0:38.7 | has some 3,500 books on the shelves. |
| 0:41.8 | He once wrote to his brother that he hoped to crowd so many books and papers into the place |
| 0:47.0 | that it shall have as much wit as it can carry. |
| 0:50.9 | But even among all that competition, this manuscript stood out. |
| 0:55.6 | So today, Emerson sits down to write its author a letter. |
| 1:02.9 | Dear Sir, he begins. Then he calls the new work a wonderful gift. |
| 1:08.8 | The most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. |
| 1:14.8 | It's the kind of praise that a young writer could only dream of getting from a writer of Emerson's stature. |
| 1:20.1 | And yet, here it is, laid down an ink by Emerson's own hand. |
| 1:26.3 | The recipient of this letter is Walt Whitman, who, at 36 years old, |
| 1:32.6 | has just published his very first work, an astonishing volume of poetry called Leaves of Grass. |
| 1:40.8 | He's unknown at this moment, but Emerson is among the first to see where Whitman is heading. |
| 1:46.2 | I greet you at the beginning of a great career, Emerson writes, which must have had a long foreground |
| 1:53.8 | somewhere for such a start. Today, the foreground. And some of the ground. |
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