Walt Whitman first published Leaves of Grass in 1855 as a ninety-five-page volume containing twelve unnamed poems, printing it himself. He published revised and expanded editions in 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, and a final "deathbed edition" in 1891-92, eventually producing a collection of nearly four hundred poems. The 1855 edition's first poem, initially untitled and later called "Song of Myself," begins "I celebrate myself, and sing myself", a departure from every convention of American poetry at the time so complete that Emerson wrote immediately to praise "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." The ninety-section poem ranges across American geography, labor, the human body, death, and the nature of identity in ways that resist summary.
Whitman's formal innovation was the abandonment of rhyme and regular meter for long lines organized by parallelism and rhythmic repetition, what he called "organic form," shaped by the content it expressed rather than inherited convention. The catalogues, the extended lists of occupations, geographies, types of people, are the formal expression of his democratic argument: that no category of human experience is too common or too physically specific for poetry, that the laborer, the slave, and the prostitute belong in the same imaginative space as the hero and the philosopher. The 1860 "Calamus" poems, which address male friendship and love with unusual directness, were understood by Whitman's contemporaries as coded homosexual expression and have been read that way since.
Whitman's influence on American poetry, on Carl Sandburg, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, and dozens of others, is so pervasive that reading him directly can feel less necessary than reading the tradition he produced. The argument for reading Leaves of Grass in its original or early forms is that the ambitions Whitman stated explicitly, to contain contradictions, to embody the American multitude in a single voice, to make a democratic art adequate to democratic experience, are still the ambitions American poetry argues with, and arguing with them is easier when the original formulation is precise rather than received.
Walt Whitman self-published the first Leaves of Grass in 1855 and set some of the type himself.
This book is in the public domain , its copyright has expired, meaning it now belongs to everyone. All books on EbookVaultFree are sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library. Downloading them is 100% legal, free, and requires no sign-up.