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At the time of Whitman's birth in 1819, the Constitution and the democratic ideas upon which the United States of America was founded were only a generation old; America was a land of seemingly unlimited space, resources, and possibilities, but also a land with no cultural roots to call its own.
In 1820 Sydney Smith of Britain's Edinburgh Review was prompted to ask, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" But the period between Smith's remark and the publication of Whitman's first
edition of "Leaves of Grass" in 1855 was to become one of the most dynamic in American literary history.
By 1855, America could boast one of the world's largest and most advanced publishing industries, producing genuinely "American" books by authors such as Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Fuller, Thoreau, and Emerson.
The amazing growth of American literature and of the publishing industry was the result of a self-conscious effort by authors and publishers to establish an American literary culture.
When Walt Whitman published his first edition of "Leaves of Grass" in 1855, he believed he
was embarking on a "personal literary journey of national significance". In the preface he
announced that his poetry would celebrate the greatness of the new nation-"The Americans of
all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United
States themselves are essentially the greatest poem"-and of the people-"The largeness of
nature or the nation were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the
spirit of the citizen".