WALT WHITMAN
Yesterday & Today
BY
 Henry Eduard Legler
CHICAGO
BROTHERS OF THE BOOK
1916
Copyright 1916
by the
Brothers of the Book
The edition of this book consists of sixhundred copies on this Fabriano hand-madepaper, and the type distributed.
This copy is Number 2
To Dr. Max Henius
CONSISTENT HATER OF SHAMS
ARDENT LOVER OF ALL OUTDOORS
AND GENEROUS GIVER OF SELF
IN GENUINE FELLOWSHIP

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
 Walt Whitman: Yesterday & Today
I[9]
On a day about mid-year in 1855, the conventionalliterary world was startled into indecorous behaviorby the unannounced appearance of a thin quartosheaf of poems, in form and in tone unlike anything ofprecedent issue. It was called Leaves of Grass, andthere were but twelve poems in the volume. No author’sname appeared upon the title page, the separate poemsbore no captions, there was no imprint of publisher. Asteel engraving of a man presumably between thirty andforty years of age, coatless, shirt flaringly open at theneck, and a copyright notice identifying Walter Whitmanwith the publication, furnished the only clues. Uncouthin size, atrociously printed, and shockingly frankin the language employed, the volume evoked such atirade of rancorous condemnation as perhaps bears noparallel in the history of letters. From contemporarycriticisms might be compiled an Anthology of Anathemacomparable to Wagner’s Schimpf-Lexicon, or theDictionary of Abuse suggested by William Archer forHenrik Ibsen. Some of the striking adjectives andphrases employed in print would include the following,as applied either to the verses or their author:[10]
  • The slop-bucket of Walt Whitman.
  • A belief in the preciousness of filth.
  • Entirely bestial.
  • Nastiness and animal insensibility to shame.
  • Noxious weeds.
  • Impious and obscene.
  • Disgusting burlesque.
  • Broken out of Bedlam.
  • Libidinousness and swell of self-applause.
  • Defilement.
  • Crazy outbreak of conceit and vulgarity.
  • Ithyphallic audacity.
  • Gross indecency.
  • Sunken sensualist.
  • Rotten garbage of licentious thoughts.
  • Roots like a pig.
  • Rowdy Knight Errant.
  • A poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils.
  • Its liberty is the wildest license; its love the essence of the lowest lust!
  • Priapus—worshipping obscenity.
  • Rant and rubbish.
  • Linguistic silliness.[11]
  • Inhumanly insolent.
  • Apotheosis of Sweat.
  • Mouthings of a mountebank.
  • Venomously malignant.
  • Pretentious twaddle.
  • Degraded helot of literature.
  • His work, like a maniac’s robe, bedizened with fluttering tags of a thousand colors.
  • Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through every field of lascivious thought.
  • Muck of abomination.
A few quotations from the press of this period willserve to indicate the general tenor of comment:
“The book might pass for merely hectoring and ludicrous,if it were not something a great deal moreoffensive,” observed the Christian Examiner (Boston,1856). “It openly deifies the bodily organs, senses, a                        
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