Leaves of Grass [Paperback]

Ralph Waldo Emerson issued a call for a great poet to capture and immortalize the unique American experience. In 1855, an answer came with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
 
Today, this masterful collection remains not only a seminal event in American literature but also the incomparable achievement of one of America’s greatest poets—an exuberant, passionate man who loved his country and wrote of it as no other has ever done. Walt Whitman was a singer, thinker, visionary, and citizen extraordinaire. Thoreau called Whitman “probably the greatest democrat that ever lived,” and Emerson judgedLeaves of Grassas “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.”
 
The text presented here is that of the “Deathbed” or ninth edition ofLeaves of Grass, published in 1892. The content and grouping of poems is the version authorized by Whitman himself for the final and complete edition of his masterpiece.“Whitman's best poems have that permanent quality of being freshly painted, of not being dulled by the varnish of the years.”—Malcolm CowleyIn 1855,Walt Whitman(1819–92) published his great tribute to America, the volume of poems that was to become his masterpiece,Leaves of Grass. Although praised by Emerson, the work met with a disappointing reception, and Whitman went on to become a war correspondent and government clerk, devoting much of his time to caring for the sick and wounded in hospitals around Washington. His reactions to and interpretations of the struggle for freedom are to be found inDrum-Tapsand the Civil War section ofSpecimen Days.
 
Billy Collinshas published nine volumes of poetry, most recentlyHoroscopes of the Dead. He is also the editor ofPoetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry.  He served as United States poet laureate from 2001l“2