No unsavoury connotations: Walt Whitman and his British Readers

In March 1856 the Saturday Review, a London-based weekly, notified its readers that it had received a volume of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass “under rather singular circumstances”. Not only had the author sent in the copy himself, unrequested, but he had also suggested “pretty broad hints” towards a favourable review, including clippings of glowing appreciations published in the American press. A canny self-publicist, Whitman had in fact written most of these reviews himself, partly to generate press attention but also to set the parameters for the interpretation and discussion of his work. In sending them to the Saturday Review, Whitman hoped to influence the way his unconventional poetry – what Punch called his “mad book” – was read and received on this side of the Atlantic.