Good morning.

Today, a book with no author’s name on the cover… and the printer who set some of the type himself, because he was also the poet.

Let’s begin.

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The Poet Who Printed Himself

Walt Whitman—“Leaves of Grass”

B	rooklyn. 4 July, 1855. A thin, oversized book went on sale with no author’s name on its cover. No publisher had taken a chance on it. The man who wrote it had paid for the printing himself.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was born on Long Island and raised in Brooklyn. He left school at fourteen and worked, at various points, as a printer, teacher, journalist, and carpenter. None of those jobs quite stuck. Writing did.

He had the book printed at a Brooklyn shop run by his friends Andrew and Thomas Rome, and stayed involved in every stage of production, setting some of the type with his own hands. Only 795 copies came off the press, about 200 of them bound in the now-famous dark green cloth. Roughly 200 copies of any kind are known to survive today.

Since there was no name on the title page, this engraving became the only way readers could put a face to the book.

Walt Whitman, steel engraving, frontispiece to the 1855 Leaves of Grass

Samuel Hollyer, engraving after a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison, frontispiece to “Leaves of Grass,” 1855.

Whitman stands with one hand on his hip, hat tilted… shirt open at the collar, dressed like a laborer rather than a gentleman author. Readers at the time were used to portraits of writers in formal coats and ties. Whitman gave them what scholars now call the “carpenter portrait” instead, on purpose.

The book held twelve untitled poems, one of which later became “Song of Myself.” The lines had no regular rhyme or meter, which struck many readers of 1855 as barely poetry at all. Whitman disagreed with the entire premise of the complaint.

I once tried reading “Song of Myself” front to back in one sitting, expecting a poem. What I got felt closer to one very long, very confident conversation, which turned out to be exactly what Whitman was going for.

The essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) received a copy and wrote Whitman a private letter of praise. Whitman, without asking permission, had the most quotable line stamped in gold on the spine of the next edition, turning a personal note into an advertisement. Emerson never publicly objected.

Whitman kept revising the book for the rest of his life, through six or nine editions depending on how you count them, growing from twelve poems to nearly four hundred by the final “deathbed edition” of 1891–92. He died in Camden, New Jersey, months after that edition appeared.

He once wrote, without apology, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

No name on the cover in 1855… by 1892, no one needed one.

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Three Things Worth Knowing

I	Art Eakins’s Whitman

In 1887 and 1888, the Philadelphia realist painter Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) painted the elderly Whitman from life, at his home in Camden. Whitman, by then heavy and bearded, called it the only truthful portrait ever made of him, preferring Eakins’s unflattering honesty to decades of more flattering engravings. The painting now hangs at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the school where Eakins himself once taught.

II	Le Mot Juste Free Verse

The term describes poetry written without a fixed rhyme scheme or regular meter, the pattern Whitman broke from almost entirely in “Leaves of Grass.” English poets had experimented with looser forms before him, but Whitman is widely credited with making free verse a serious, deliberate American choice rather than a failure to follow the rules. Nearly every major poet who came after him had to decide what to do with that freedom.

III	Philosophy Transcendentalism

Emerson’s own philosophy held that individual intuition, and a direct bond with nature, mattered more than inherited tradition or institutional religion. He had spent years calling for an American poet bold enough to write from that belief. When Whitman’s book landed on his desk, Emerson recognized his own ideas staring back at him, fully formed and considerably louder.

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Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Seeing This Week

Whitman’s own home in Camden is currently closed for renovation, but his tomb, which he designed himself, is open every day but Sunday. He modeled it on a William Blake etching called “Death’s Door.”

Where: Harleigh Cemetery, 1640 Haddon Avenue, Camden, NJ 08103. Hours: Monday to Saturday, 8:30am to 4:30pm; free admission, no ticket required. Insider tip: take the first left after the main gate and follow the paved road; the tomb sits in a small wooded hillside a short walk in. Get directions at thewaltwhitmanassociation.org →

Worth Reading

Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition — Walt Whitman, ed. Malcolm Cowley. The original twelve poems, before decades of revision softened some of their rougher edges.

Walt Whitman: A Life — Justin Kaplan (1980). A National Book Award–winning biography, still one of the most readable accounts of Whitman’s strange, self-invented career.

The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War — Roy Morris Jr. (2000). Whitman’s years as a volunteer hospital visitor in Washington, tending wounded soldiers from both sides.

New Patent Reveals Elon Musk’s Next Breakthrough: M.A.G.I.

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Take a look at Elon Musk’s new patent below…

Because it protects a new invention that could rewrite the future of wealth forever.

I’m talking about a radical new form of AI I call “M.A.G.I.”

One so revolutionary that Elon called it an “infinite money glitch.”

Click here to see the details because he believes this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create wealth on a scale most people can’t even comprehend.

What’s the upside potential here?

I know this is going to sound crazy…

But Elon is projecting growth of over 7,000,000%.

Let that sink in.

That’s enough to turn $100 into more than $7 million.

This sounds absolutely insane.

But then again… everything Elon has ever done sounded insane at first.

Self-driving cars.

Reusable rockets that land themselves.

Brain chips that let paralyzed people control computers with their minds.

Crazy ideas.

But he turned them into trillion-dollar realities.

So here’s the real question…

Will you watch Elon build another empire from the sidelines…

Or will you finally position yourself to potentially become one of the winners in his next trillion-dollar revolution?

Click here to get the details because I believe Elon will flip the switch on this new invention by the end of this month.

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Test Your Knowledge

1How did readers of the 1855 “Leaves of Grass” know who wrote it?

Only from an engraved portrait; no author’s name appeared on the cover

From a large signature printed across the title page

The publisher’s name appeared instead, and readers assumed authorship

Answer: Only from an engraved portrait. Whitman’s name appeared nowhere on the cover, only in a small copyright notice inside.

2What does “free verse” mean?

Poetry written without a fixed rhyme scheme or regular meter

Poetry distributed to readers at no cost

A fourteen-line poem with no fixed subject

Answer: Poetry without a fixed rhyme scheme or meter. Whitman didn’t invent the idea, but he is widely credited with making it a serious American choice.

3What did Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy, transcendentalism, emphasize?

Individual intuition and a direct bond with nature

Strict obedience to inherited European tradition

Rigid, formal meter as the mark of serious poetry

Answer: Individual intuition and a direct bond with nature. Emerson had spent years calling for an American poet bold enough to write from exactly that belief, then found him in Whitman.

If the links above don’t respond in your email app, just reply with your answers—I’ll write back.

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That’s all for today.

Tomorrow, one word… and the odd afterlife it’s had since someone first coined it.

In good taste,

Charles T. Mayfair

Editor, Connoisseur Daily

P.S. The full 1855 text is free at the Walt Whitman Archive online… no need to track down one of the roughly 200 surviving copies to read Whitman exactly as his first readers did.