Walt Whitman

In 1855, an unknown but wildly ambitious young poet self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, consisting of twelve untitled poems and an explanatory preface. Walt Whitman spent the rest of his life engaged in expanding and revising this work, through six editions and nearly four decades, establishing Leaves of Grass as one of the central works in the history of world poetry. This edition reproduces the magnificent "death-bed edition," published...

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced." Published at the author's expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass inaugurated a new voice and style into American letters and gave expression to an optimistic, bombastic vision that took the nation as its...

A collection of fifty-three poems and selections from poems focusing on the people and places encountered by the nineteenth-century American writer from his mid-thirties through his early seventies.

One of the Greatest Poems in American Literature Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was considered by many to be one of the most important American poets of all time. He had a profound influence on all those who came after him. "Song of Myself", a portion of Whitman's monumental poetry collection "Leaves of Grass", is one of his most beloved poems. It was through this moving piece that Whitman first made himself known to the world. One of the most acclaimed...

Walt Whitman experienced the agonies of the Civil War firsthand as a volunteer in Washington's military hospitals. This superb selection of poems, letters, and prose from that era includes "O Captain! My Captain!" "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "Adieu to a Soldier," and many other moving works.

"This volume reprints the whole of the initial, 1855 version of Leaves of grass (with titles and section numbers, as they would appear in later editions, supplied in brackets). Added, too, are a handful of poems from across the length of Whitman's career--these taken from the 1891-92 "Deathbed edition," though arranged chronologically--and selected prose pieces"--P. xiii.