'Leaves of Glass is based on correspondence between Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and Bernard O’Dowd (1866–1953). The letters, more than twenty of which have now been found, were written between 1899 and 1892. At that time, Whitman was at the end of his life and his career, and O’Dowd (whose first collection, Dawnward, would not be published until 1903) was a young legal librarian who wore a blade of grass in his lapel as a tribute to Whitman.' (Publisher's blurb)
Epigraph:
'[Christopher] Brennan's contemporary, Bernard O'Dowd,
espoused the cause of nationalism, and attained a far
greater reputation in his day; but unlike Brennan's.
his work has dated badly.'
–Judith Wright
A Book of Australian Verse (1968)
'I am an enigma to myself.'
–Bernard O'Dowd
letter to Walt Whitman, 1890
