Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaf of Faces’
In a poem towards the end of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, in 1860 entitled ‘Leaf of Faces’, Whitman explored a printer’s metaphor, the meaning of ‘faces’, comparing the expressive appearance of humans and that of type on the page. Within a poetic
structure that resembles both a walk and leafing through a foundry specimen book, Whitman catalogues the faces he sees, describing a human parade, or roadside signs and billboards, labels, broadsides and book pages – descriptions that address emotional and spiritual qualities and never
specify exactly whether they apply to human or type faces. As Karen Karbiener (2012) notes in her essay ‘Reading the Promise of Faces’: ‘His descriptions seldom involve physical appearance; race is never mentioned and gender rarely comes up.’ What interests the poet
is the importance of physical appearance as an indicator of deeper meaning. In type, the shapes of the letters suggest a meaning independent of their use, a subliminal expressive power that can be read instantly, before the words form in the mind. His belief in phrenology – the then-popular
study of the shape of the skull and its correlation to personality characteristics – may have led him to this idea. His employment in the printing and publishing trades from an early age – as a compositor, journalist, editor and publisher – informed a deep interest in the
design and production of his books of poetry. Printers’ jargon often turns up in his work, as veiled double-entendres perhaps only explicable to other initiates of the trade.
Keywords: books; letterforms; poetry; printing; publishing; typography
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: Independent scholar
Publication date: 01 March 2011
- Book 2.0 is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles and reviews about historical, modern and contemporary book creation, design, illustration and production. Since its founding in 2010, Book 2.0 has explored topics that have included children's literature and culture, traditional and modern storytelling, oral literature, poetry publishing and the enormous efforts being made by Indigenous speakers and their supporters to secure and sustain endangered languages.
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