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.
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“Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard."[]””
— Walt Whitman
“The President is there in the White House for you, it is not youwho are here for him,The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them,The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you,Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, thegoing and coming of commerce and mails, are all for you.List close my scholars dear,Doctrines, politics and civilization exurge from you,Sculpture and monuments and any thing inscribed anywhere aretallied in you,The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records reachis in you this hour, and myths and tales the same,If you were not breathing and walking here, where would theyall be?The most renown'd poems would be ashes, orations and playswould be vacuums.””
— Walt Whitman
“Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus'wanderings,Placard "Removed" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowyParnassus,Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on Jaffa's gate and onMount Moriah,The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanishcastles, and Italian collections,For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domainawaits, demands you.- Song of the Exposition””
— Walt Whitman
“The mark of true genius in the arts is an immediately recognizable style.””
— Walt Whitman
