she convulses me like the climax
of my love-grip;
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast,
It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,
It sails me .... I dab with bare feet .... They are licked by the
indolent waves,
I am exposed .... cut by bitter and poisoned hail,
Steeped amid honeyed morphine .... my windpipe squeezed in
the fakes of death
Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being (“[Song of Myself],” 1855, p. 57).

The wonder of this ecstatic revelation is that it is both a private and a public experience. His feelings are inspired by human connections: Alboni’s voice, the orchestra’s resonance, the excitement of his fellow concertgoers, the hum of electric city life just outside. If anything has ever defined the idea of a “New York moment,” it is this brief and wonderful merge of inner being with common understanding. An accumulation of such moments, plus years of taking in the city and reimagining it on paper, led to the creation of the self-declared “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos” (“[Song of Myself],” p. 52). And since Whitman perceived New York to be at the heart of America, his love for the city enabled and inspired the love of his country. The diversity, energy, and ambitions of New York represented the promise of America: By finding his voice on city streets and ferries, he was able to sing for his country’s open roads and great rivers.

City of the world! (for all races are here,
All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)
City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!
City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in
and out with eddies and foam!
City of wharves and stores-city of tall façades of marble and iron!
Proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
(“City of Ships,” p. 444).

If the poet’s heart was based in Manhattan, the title “Leaves of Grass” for not one but several of his books seems an odd choice. And what of the green cover and gold-embossed, organic-looking lettering that made the book resemble a volume of domestic fiction more than a serious effort? The title and appearance were not the only surprises of the 9- by 12-inch, 95-page volume: Most notably, no author’s name appeared anywhere on the cover or first pages. Though the image of Whitman as a provocative and confident working man looked up from the frontispiece, his name came up only about halfway through the first poem-which was, confusingly, also entitled “Leaves of Grass,” as were the next five poems.

The quirky details were all deliberate. The title echoed the names of literary productions by women (such as Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, Fanny Fern’s popular book of 1853), and the outward appearance also was designed to get readers to question the sexist boundaries of the book industry (note, too, that Whitman’s preferred trousers through the late 1850s were “bloomers,” the loose-fitting pants that were the male equivalent of those worn by women’s rights activists, such as Amelia Bloomer). “Leaves of Grass” was also an obvious metaphor for the unregulated, “organically grown” lines of the poems in the “leaves” of the book. But Whitman was also using “grass” as a symbol of American democracy. Simple and universal, grass represents common ground. Each leaf (Whitman thought the proper word “blade” was literally too sharp) has a singular identity yet is a necessary contributor to the whole. Likewise, each reader will find that he or she is part of Leaves of Grass—a book about all Americans that could have been written by any American (hence, the absence of the author’s name).

When the first publisher Whitman approached refused to print the manuscript on the grounds of its offensive contents, he took it to the Rome printing shop on Cranberry and Fulton Streets in Brooklyn Heights. The Rome brothers were friends and neighbors, and they agreed to work on the volume if Whitman would lend a hand with the job. “800 copies were struck off on a hand press by Andrew Rome ... the author himself setting some of the type,” noted Whitman (Correspondence, vol. 6, p. 30). Legend has it that most of the copies remained in a back room of the shop “until they were finally discarded as liabilities” (Garrett, The Rome Printing Shop, p. 4). The price of two dollars was apparently deemed too high by Whitman, because a second issue printed later that year with a plain paper cover cost one dollar. “All in all a thousand copies were printed but practically none sold,” writes Florence Rome Garrett, the granddaughter of Tom Rome (Garrett, p.