The “Long Foreground” of Leaves of Grass

Abstract

ABSTRACT Walt Whitman began his career in journalism at age twelve, was editor and proprietor of a Long Island weekly by nineteen, and continued working as an editor and freelance contributor during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, the decades when he published the first four editions of Leaves of Grass. Selected Journalism focuses on work published before the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, promoting understanding of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the volume's “long foreground.” Whitman's journalism can be seen as a warm-up for Leaves of Grass, but it also reveals how conventional his prose can be in both tropes and attitudes. An unaddressed issue in Selected Journalism is the problem of attribution, given that almost all of the contents were originally published anonymously.