That person was Elias Wilentz, the proprietor of Greenwich Village’s Eighth Street Bookshop, defunct now but in its day a popular place among writers. Of the entire campaign only the tiniest ember can be said to have survived, and even that merely in the memory of the person who had led the failed effort.

And at the site where “Leaves of Grass” was first printed not a blessed thing of Whitman’s can be seen today except a number of small, immodest signs, tacked to a wall, that say with unspeakable taste, “Whitman Owner Corp.” In the age of urban renewal, real estate was king, and down went the beloved old building in favor of an empty concrete plaza (considered the acme of architectural grace in those days) fronting a soulless middle-class housing development. A small, harmless misconception about the building-that it had once been Whitman’s home, not just his printshop-crept into the public consciousness and lent further strength to the campaign, A group of a hundred and six students and faculty members from Smith College signed an emotional appeal based on that misconception, and the appeal duly made its way into the press.īut neither inflated claims nor powerful names were of any use. Names great (Arthur Miller, Marianne Moore) and small (e. But there were still people who looked with reverence on the old structure and wished to see it survive the depredations of what was known in those days as “urban renewal.”Ī campaign on the building’s behalf got under way. Of course, by 1961 the printshop was long gone a restaurant called the Managua Luncheonette was in its place. In 1855, the Rome brothers, friends of the poet’s, ran a printshop in that building, and Whitman came in every day to help do the work on his book. It was on the corner of Cranberry and Fulton Streets (now called Cadman Plaza West), at the edge of Brooklyn Heights-a three-story red brick structure, plain and undistinguished except for a bronze tablet displaying Whitman’s face surrounded by the aureole of his hair and beard.

As late as 1961, the building in Brooklyn where Walt Whitman set several pages of type for the original edition of “Leaves of Grass” was still standing.

Leaves of grass original 12 poems