LEAVES OF GRASS
Walt Whitman
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2015
Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Silvia Crompton asserts her moral right as author of the Life & Times section
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from
Collins English Dictionary
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Cover image: Mary Evans / Everett Collection
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Source ISBN: 9780008110604
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008110611
Version: 2015-07-21
Contents
Copyright
History of Collins
Life & Times
Song of Myself
A Song for Occupations
To Think of Time
The Sleepers
I Sing the Body Electric
Faces
Song of the Answerer
Europe: The 72d and 73d Years of These States
A Boston Ballad [1854]
There Was a Child Went Forth
Who Learns My Lesson Complete?
Great Are the Myths
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases
About the Publisher
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly “Victorian” in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of “books for the millions” was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
A Child Went Forth
Walt Whitman was born in New York in 1819, the second child of a family that eventually grew to nine. Despite the best efforts of Walter Whitman Sr., a carpenter who turned his hand unsuccessfully to real-estate speculation, the family was forced by economic hardship to move house often. As a result, Whitman had a disjointed education and left school at the age of eleven in order to seek employment.
But though formal schooling did not serve him well, Whitman, left to his own devices, quickly learned to love self-improvement. His first employer, a Brooklyn law firm, gave him access to library books and he became an avid reader and visitor of museums. Aged twelve he went to work for a liberal newspaper, the Long Island Patriot, where he was apprenticed in printing and typesetting and even made contributions to articles. He spent the next five years honing his reputation as a printer, and above all making the most of being on his own in New York City. It was a period of rapid and dazzling development, and Whitman never tired of walking the streets and observing the teeming beauty of life around him. It was an experience that surely influenced his poem ‘There Was a Child Went Forth’, which appeared in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855:
There was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became …
The streets themselves, and the façades of houses, and goods in the windows …
The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud …
But it was not to last: a combination of financial instability and a devastating fire in New York’s printing district sent him back to his family