Poems by Walt Whitman

In 1855, a Brooklyn newspaper printer with no formal literary training published a book of poetry that would revolutionize American literature and reshape the very shape of the English language on the page. Leaves of Grass arrived as an act of radical self-creation: a towering, uncorseted voice announcing itself to the world with the audacious declaration "I celebrate myself, and sing myself." Whitman's verse invented free verse itself, discarding meter and rhyme for long, rolling lines that mimic breath and thought in motion. He celebrates the body electric, the common laborer, the prostitute, the president, a blade of grass, all with equal reverence. This collection gathers the complete poems from Whitman's final "deathbed" edition, along with earlier versions including the original 1855 "Song of Myself." Here too is the devastating elegy for Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and the visionary "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Whitman offered America a mirror: vast, democratic, uncensored, insistently plural. More than a century later, his insistence that "each man and woman keeping pace with yesterday" is "the seed of others" continues to reverberate. This is poetry as manifesto, as prophecy, as body and soul made text.