Home Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman; Afterword by Peter Davison (ISBN: 9780451527585)

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Leaves of Grass Mass market paperbound - 2000

Name: Leaves of Grass, a Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 1855-1856 Vol. I-III
Price: 5.00 USD
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Author: Whitman, Walt
ISBN: 9780451527585

by Walt Whitman; Afterword by Peter Davison

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About this book

Leaves of Grass (1855) is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman. Among the poems in the collection are "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and in later editions, Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. " Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death. The first edition published in 1855 contained 12 poems on 95 pages. The final edition published contained almost 400 poems.

Summary

Leaves of Grass is a collection of poems by Walt Whitman originally published in 1855 at the poet's own expense. Criticized when first released for Whitman's use of free verse and his rather racy depictions of sexual love and the senses, Leaves of Grass is a celebration of the human form, the material world and nature.

From the publisher

Here are the incomparable poems of one of America's greatest poets. Singer, thinker, visionary, and citizen extraordinaire, this was Walt Whitman, the man Thoreau called "probably the greatest democrat that ever lived". The content and grouping of this newly typeset edition is the version authorized by Whitman himself for the final and complete edition of his masterpiece.

First Edition Identification

On May 15, 1855, Whitman registered the title Leaves of Grass with the clerk of the United States District Court, Southern District of New Jersey, and received its copyright. The first edition was published on July 4, 1855, in Brooklyn, at the printing shop of two Scottish immigrants, James and Andrew Rome, whom Whitman had known since the 1840s. Whitman paid for and did much of the typesetting for the first edition himself. The book did not include the author's name, and instead offered an engraving by Samuel Hollyer depicting Whitman in work clothes and a jaunty hat, arms at his side. Early advertisements for the first edition appealed to "lovers of literary curiosities" as an oddity. Sales on the book were few, but Whitman was not discouraged.

The first edition was very small, collecting only twelve unnamed poems in 95 pages. Whitman once said he intended the book to be small enough to be carried in a pocket. "That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air", he explained. About 800 were printed, though only 200 were bound in its trademark green cloth cover. The only American library known to have purchased a copy of the first edition was in Philadelphia. The poems of the first edition, which were given titles in later issues, were "Song of Myself", "A Song for Occupations", "To Think of Time", "The Sleepers", "I Sing the Body Electric", "Faces", "Song of the Answerer", "Europe: The 72d and 73d Years of These States", "A Boston Ballad", "There Was a Child Went Forth", "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?", and "Great Are the Myths".