But the crowning curio of this rare, spectacular 1913 edition - a surviving copy of which I was fortunate to acquire at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair - are twenty-four color plates by the English artist Margaret C. Dent published what remains the most beautiful edition of the Whitman classic - a large, lavish tome bound in green cloth, with the title emblazoned in gilt. Twenty-one years after Whitman’s death, Everyman’s Library series creator J.M. But over the coming decades, largely thanks to Emerson’s extraordinary letter of endorsement and encouragement, it became one of the most beloved books in America - a proto-viral masterpiece that forever changed the face and spirit of literature, bold and fresh and replete with “incomparable things said incomparably,” creaturely yet cosmic, bridging the earthly and the eternal yet larger than both. When thirty-six-year-old Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in the summer of 1855, having poured the whole of his being into this unusual and daring labor of love, it fell upon unreceptive and downright hostile ears - a rejection that devastated the young poet.
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