Produced by Irma Spehar and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) WALT WHITMAN _Yesterday & Today_ BY HENRY EDUARD LEGLER CHICAGO BROTHERS OF THE BOOK 1916 COPYRIGHT 1916 BY THE BROTHERS OF THE BOOK The edition of this book consists of six hundred copies on this Fabriano hand-made paper, and the type distributed. This copy is Number 2 TO DR. MAX HENIUS CONSISTENT HATER OF SHAMS ARDENT LOVER OF ALL OUTDOORS AND GENEROUS GIVER OF SELF IN GENUINE FELLOWSHIP THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED _Walt Whitman: Yesterday & Today_ I On a day about mid-year in 1855, the conventional literary world was startled into indecorous behavior by the unannounced appearance of a thin quarto sheaf of poems, in form and in tone unlike anything of precedent issue. It was called Leaves of Grass, and there were but twelve poems in the volume. No author's name appeared upon the title page, the separate poems bore no captions, there was no imprint of publisher. A steel engraving of a man presumably between thirty and forty years of age, coatless, shirt flaringly open at the neck, and a copyright notice identifying Walter Whitman with the publication, furnished the only clues. Uncouth in size, atrociously printed, and shockingly frank in the language employed, the volume evoked such a tirade of rancorous condemnation as perhaps bears no parallel in the history of letters. From contemporary criticisms might be compiled an Anthology of Anathema comparable to Wagner's Schimpf-Lexicon, or the Dictionary of Abuse suggested by William Archer for Henrik Ibsen. Some of the striking adjectives and phrases employed in print would include the following, as applied either to the verses or their author: The slop-bucket of Walt Whitman. A belief in the preciousness of filth. Entirely bestial. Nastiness and animal insensibility to shame. Noxious weeds. Impious and obscene. Disgusting burlesque. Broken out of Bedlam. Libidinousness and swell of self-applause. Defilement. Crazy outbreak of conceit and vulgarity. Ithyphallic audacity. Gross indecency. Sunken sensualist. Rotten garbage of licentious thoughts. Roots like a pig. Rowdy Knight Errant. A poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils. Its liberty is the wildest license; its love the essence of the lowest lust! Priapus--worshipping obscenity. Rant and rubbish. Linguistic silliness. Inhumanly insolent. Apotheosis of Sweat. Mouthings of a mountebank. Venomously malignant. Pretentious twaddle. Degraded helot of literature. His work, like a maniac's robe, bedizened with fluttering tags of a thousand colors. Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through every field of lascivious thought. Muck of abomination.