Literature

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was inspired by “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 essay calling for a new poetic voice unique to the United States. The copy on display here is a first edition, printed in fewer than 900 copies of which fairly few sold. Whitman sent a copy to Emerson, who wrote in response, “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.”

According to an inscription on the fourth blank leaf before the title page, this copy was gifted by Whitman to Emerson. It was later owned by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, a journalist and memorialist of American transcendentalism, and is thought to have been gifted to the Library by Charles E. Feinberg, a prosperous, Detroit-based book and manuscript collector who specialized in Whitmaniana.

The broadside at left is one of the first printed by Dudley Randall at Detroit’s Broadside Press, one of America’s oldest African-American owned publishers. As the list of broadsides shows, the press primarily published inexpensive editions of single poems by African-American writers, many of whom were overlooked by other publishers. This poem is by Robert Hayden, who was born in Detroit and both attended and taught at the University. In 1976, Hayden became the first African-American to have the role now known as United States Poet Laureate. In 2000, the Library acquired the Broadside Press Records from Don and Hilda Vest, who purchased the press in 1985 and restructured it into a non-profit organization.