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Whitman, as Printed

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Walt Whitman

The Poet of

Leaves of Grass

From 1855 to 1892 · Camden, New Jersey

Free, fresh, savage,

Fluent, luxuriant, self-content, fond of persons and places,

From “Proto-Leaf,” the first poem of the 1860 Leaves of Grass

Nine Rooms

a poem in each, with photographs

Coming up

Walking With Whitman: Poetry in Performance

November 12, 2026 · 7 pm

Walt Whitman Birthplace, Huntington Station, New York

The die for the sun, 4.3 × 6.5 cm. Library of Congress. It stamps its own mirror image, as drawn above.

Whitman’s home set as a broadside, after the 1860 Leaves of Grass, whose titles were set “in various fonts and sizes”: each display line here takes its own face, and all are set to one width. Each ornament does the work it did in that book: the head-piece over “Proto-Leaf,” the starred rule under the title, the butterfly closing the contents. The sun at the head is the one the book prints on its pages, first on page 242. Under an arch, and with fewer waves, it was stamped on the back cover by the brass die shown here, now at the Library of Congress. Of the book, Whitman wrote to his brother Jeff: “the freshest and handsomest piece of typography that had ever passed through his mill … It is quite ‘odd,’ of course.”