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150 years ago this week, a journalist originally from Long Island published his first manuscript of poems, transforming himself as a writer of news and short fiction into one of America’s most important poets. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is being celebrated this summer by the University of Virginia, which has several of the original manuscripts at the Harrison Institute’s Small Special Collections library. Many of these items are on display in the Institute’s first-floor gallery through mid-August.
This past spring, the Virginia Quarterly Review dedicated a special issue to Whitman’s work. VQR is collaborating with special collections on a series of gallery talks, given by editor Ted Genoways, to discuss the library’s holdings. Genoways is working on a dissertation on Whitman, and below is one of his talks, this one from June 28, 2005.
Whitman has famously declared that Leaves of Grass was published on July 4, 2005, but Ted Genoways explains that this isn’t necessarily the case.
This file is now offline, and was sadly lost to the great Wordcast Laptop crash of 2006…