Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass"

• Date: 1851 - 1899

• Location: USA

• Subject: Sexuality

• Medium: Literature

• Artist/Author/Producer: Whitman, Walt (1819-1892)

• Confronting Bodies: the Society for Suppression of Vice, the Boston, MA District Attorney

• Dates of action: 1855-82

• Location: United States

Description of the Art Work

"Leaves of Grass", 1855: Collection of poems. The poems addressed the citizens of the United States, urging them to be large and generous in spirit, a new race of races nurtured in political liberty, possessed of united souls and bodies.

Complete text of "Leaves of Grass"

Description of incident

1855 United States: The poems shocked America puritanism and English Victorianism, although Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to the New York Times, calling the book "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." The Library Company of Philadelphia was the only American library known to have bought a copy of the publication.

1868 England-London: After reading "Leaves of Grass", Mrs. Anne Gilcrist defended his use of banned words in "A woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" and said: "A quarrel with words is more or less a quarrel with meanings ...If the thing a word stands for exists (and what does not exist?), the word need never be ashamed of itself; the shorter and more direct the better. It is a gain to make friends with it, and see it in good company."

Results of incident

1881 United States-Boston MA: The District Attorney, at the urging of agents of the Society for Suppression of Vice, threatened criminal prosecution unless the volume was expurgated. The book was withdrawn in Boston but published in 1882 in Philadelphia. Whittier, in rage of indignation, threw his first edition into the fire, although he himself had suffered persecution for his abolitionist poems. Wendell Phillips' comment was: "Here be all sorts of leaves except fig leaves."

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Record no 255