Walt Whitman

Seeks to supply a sounder and more uncluttered text for reading than has been heretofore available, together with variant and delected passages for study/

The author finds miracles everywhere--in nature, on city streets, and at home.

Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by American poet Walt Whitman. First published in 1855, Whitman spent most of his professional life writing and rewriting Leaves of Grass, revising it multiple times until his death. There have been held to be either six or nine individual editions of Leaves of Grass, the count varying depending on how they are distinguished.This resulted in vastly different editions over four decades—the first edition being a small book of twelve poems, and the last, a compilation of over 400. (Source: [Wikipedia](

Contains 16 poems about men at war, influenced by Whitman's experience at a volunteer hospital during the American Civil War.

This is the most comprehensive volume of Walt Whitman (1819-1892) ever published. It includes all of his poetry and what he considered his complete prose. This is also the only collection that includes, in exactly the form in which it appeared in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass. This was the book, a commercial failure, that prompted Emerson's famous message to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career". These twelve poems, including what were later to be entitled "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric", and a preface announcing the author's poetic theories, were the first stage of a massive, lifelong work. Six editions and some thirty-seven years later Leaves of Grass had become one of the central volumes in the history of world poetry. Each edition involved revisions of earlier poems and the incorporation of new ones. In 1856, for example, he added such poems as "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Spontaneous Me"; in the third edition (1860) "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and two new sections, "Calamus" and "Children of Adam". In the fourth (1867) he incorporated the Civil War poems published a few years earlier as Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps, including the poems on the death of Lincoln, notably "When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloom'd." And so it went, a triumphant progress, hailed by Emerson, Thoreau, Rossetti and others, but also, as with the sixth edition in 1881-82, beset by charges of obscenity for such poems as "A Woman Waits for Me." Printed here is the final, the great culminating edition of 1891-92, the last supervised by Whitman himself just before his death. Whitman's prose is no less extraordinary. Specimen Days and Collect (1882) includes reminiscences of nineteenth-century New York City that will fascinate readers in the twentieth, notes on the Civil War, especially his service in Washington hospitals, and trenchant comments on books and authors. Democratic Vistas (1871), in its attacks on the misuses of national wealth after the Civil War, is relevant to conditions in our own time, and November Boughs (1888) brings together retrospective prefaces, opinions, random autobiographical bits that are in effect an extended epilogue on Whitman's life, works, and times. Here it all is, the complete Whitman-elegiac, comic, furtive, outrageous-the most innovative and original of American authors.

For other editions, see Author Catalog.

Excerpts from the longer works of Walt Whitman, a nineteenth-century poet whose words celebrated man and nature.

Whitman's well-known poem is accompanied by full-page illustrations.