The Poet Who Wrote His Own Rave Reviews?

Walt Whitman, a carpenter's son who worked as a printer and journalist, broke free of meter to celebrate American democracy and ordinary people in free verse. He self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 and kept revising and expanding it until just before his death.

When his first edition drew little attention, he anonymously wrote several glowing reviews of his own book. He also took a line from a private letter Ralph Waldo Emerson had sent him—'I greet you at the beginning of a great career'—and stamped it in gold on the spine of the second edition without permission.