-Gems from Walt Whitman

In 1889, Massachusetts author and reformer Elizabeth Porter Gould selected and condensed Whitman’s poems into poetic “gems” of about five-to-ten lines each for her gift-book edition Gems from Walt Whitman. Gould said that her goal for turning Whitman’s poems into excerpted “gems” came from “seeing women’s minds ‘so stuck’ to a few phrases in his work that they could not soar on the wings of his poetry.” While Whitman hoped that the book would earn him some new readers, he also complained that “these gems, extracts, specimens, tid-bits, brilliants, sparkles, chippings are all wearisome,” and that “some books fit with them: but Leaves of Grass is different.”