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The book featured this month is the first edition of the great American poet Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a book that arguably has had more influence on American poetry than any other book ever published. This copy, from the Glenn Schaeffer Collection, is one of two copies at The University of Iowa. Schaeffer’s copy came to Iowa in 2007 as part of Schaeffer’s priceless collection of Whitman’s works that has more than doubled the size of Iowa’s already impressive collection. Schaeffer’s beautifully preserved copy of Leaves now allows Iowa faculty and students to compare two quite different copies of this rare book (fewer than 200 copies still exist), and, in the process, to discover important aspects of this volume that had not previously been apparent.
This is the book that first contains Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the long poem that begins with those famous lines that voice an unfettered faith in American individualism and American democracy, with every self sharing the world equally with all other selves:
“I celebrate myself, / And sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
The poem ends with Whitman’s reassuring lines of his ongoing presence: “I stop somewhere waiting for you”. The poem ends without a period, or so it has been reprinted in every republication of the first edition.
Many critics have built interpretations of the poem based on Whitman’s decision to leave the period off, arguing that it is part of his radical poetics, violating the rules of grammar in order to create in the reader an actual experience of an ongoing voice, as if the absence of the period invited readers to continue the poem on their own. Schaeffer’s copy, however, has the period clearly printed at the end of the poem. The other Iowa copy has no period. A recent census of all copies of the first edition reveals that only six extant copies contain the period. Clearly, the piece of type containing the period fell off early in the print run of that particular signature of the book (the book was set on a hand press), and, because most copies do not have the period, the assumption has long been made that it was Whitman’s decision, not a printing mishap.
We are still learning about the variations between copies of Whitman’s first edition, and Glenn Schaeffer’s gift, combined with the copy Iowa already owned, make Iowa’s Special Collections one of the few places in the world where these variations can be studied side by side—and where additional, yet unknown, variations might still be discovered. Ed Folsom |
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The gift of the Glenn Schaeffer Collection of Walt Whitman was announced in October 2006 on the occasion opening the Glenn Schaeffer Library and Archives addition to Dey House, home of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Schaeffer, a 1977 graduate of the Writers Workshop, is a literary philanthropist who founded the International Institute of Modern Letters and established the Schaeffer Fellowships, which supports students at the University of Iowa and other universities. This first-rate collection consists of more than 400 volumes.
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