This Library of America edition is the biggest and best edition of Walt Whitman s writings ever published. It includes all of his poetry and what he considered his complete prose. It is also the only collection that includes, in exactly the form in which it appeared in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass. This was the book, a commercial failure, which prompted Emerson’s famous message to Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” These twelve poems, including what were later to be entitled “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” and a preface announcing the author’s poetic theories were the first stage of a massive, lifelong work. Six editions and some thirty-seven years later, Leaves of Grass became one of the central volumes in the history of world poetry.
About the Author
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island and educated in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a printer s devil, journeyman compositor, itinerant schoolteacher, editor, and unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers and is widely considered the greatest American poet of the nineteenth century.
Justin Kaplan, volume editor, is a writer whose works include Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, which won a Pulitzer Prize in biography and a National Book Award. His Walt Whitman: A Life won the 1981 American Book Award for Biography.
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