Leaves of Grass

About this book

Leaves of Grass is Walt Whitman’s lifelong book of poems. He published the first edition himself in Brooklyn in 1855, a thin volume of twelve untitled poems with no author’s name on the title page, only a portrait of a bearded man in work clothes. He spent the rest of his life adding to it, rearranging it and revising it, through editions in 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1881 and the final so-called deathbed edition of 1891-92, which contains close to four hundred poems. The Project Gutenberg text is one of the later, expanded versions.

The book changed what poetry in English could sound like. Whitman abandoned rhyme and regular meter for long, loose lines built on repetition and lists, written in a voice that claimed to speak for all of America and for the reader personally. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Whitman to praise the first edition, a letter Whitman then printed without permission. Many other early readers were baffled or offended, in particular by the frankness about the body. The book’s standing rose through the twentieth century, and it is now generally treated as the founding work of American poetry.

The story

Leaves of Grass is a collection, not a narrative, but it has a shape. The long poem that opens the book proper, “Song of Myself,” sets out the speaker’s claims: that he contains multitudes, that body and soul are equal, that the reader and the poet are one. The sections that follow group poems by subject: “Children of Adam” on sexual love, “Calamus” on friendship and love between men, “Drum-Taps” on the Civil War, in which Whitman served as a volunteer hospital visitor, “Memories of President Lincoln,” which includes the elegies “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! My Captain!,” and the late poems on aging and death.

Reading it front to back follows a life from exuberant youth to old age. Most readers, though, begin with “Song of Myself” and a few of the famous shorter pieces.

Themes and historical context

Whitman was a Long Island carpenter’s son who worked as a printer, schoolteacher and newspaper editor before turning to poetry in his mid-thirties. The 1855 preface declares that the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem, and the book is in part an attempt to make a national literature from scratch, celebrating laborers, immigrants, slaves, prostitutes and presidents in the same breath. It was written in the decade before the Civil War, and the later editions carry the war and Lincoln’s assassination into the book.

The poems about the body and about love between men caused trouble from the start. The 1881 edition was withdrawn by its Boston publisher after a threat of prosecution for obscenity, and the book appears on historical banned-book lists for that reason. Modern readers and scholars have paid close attention to the “Calamus” poems in discussions of Whitman’s sexuality and of the history of gay writing in America.

Whitman’s influence on later poets, in the United States and abroad, is hard to overstate. Free verse as it is now practiced descends largely from him.

Who should read it

The complete book is long, over 100,000 words of verse, and few people read it straight through. The best approach is to read “Song of Myself” slowly, then sample. The language is plain and direct; the challenge is the absence of the usual handles of rhyme and stanza, and the sheer length of some poems. Readers who dislike formal poetry often find Whitman the exception. The Gutenberg text is the expanded late version, so readers who want the shorter, rawer 1855 book should look for a separate edition of it.

Edition notes

The Project Gutenberg edition was prepared by G. Fuhrman and David Widger.