I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career
Background
In July 1855 a thirty-six-year-old Brooklyn journalist and carpenter’s son published a book of poems himself, without his name on the title page: Leaves of Grass. Hardly anyone bought it. Walt Whitman mailed copies to a few writers he admired, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most respected man of letters in America.
Emerson read it and wrote back that same month. His letter is four short paragraphs of pure encouragement from someone who didn’t have to give it — the kind of letter that can carry a person for years.
Whitman was so thrilled he printed it in a New York newspaper that fall without asking, and stamped “I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career” in gold on the spine of his next edition. Emerson was not entirely pleased. But he was right. Thirty-four years later, Mark Twain wrote Whitman a birthday letter of his own.
The letter
Concord, Mass’tts,
21 July, 1855.
Dear Sir,
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.
I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.
I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects.
R. W. Emerson.
Mr. Walter Whitman.
Text as Whitman had it printed in 1855; the original, in Emerson’s hand, is in the Library of Congress.