Leaves of Grass: The Deathbed Edition

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass took various forms during the poet’s lifetime. The 1855 first edition was a thin pamphlet of 12 poems; the great final edition encompassed more than 300. It is the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass–commonly called “the Deathbed Edition” that remains the bard’s definitive version of what is indisputably an American classic. In Leaves of Grass , Whitman abandoned traditional Victorian poetic forms and language, handled decidedly unconventional subjects and themes, and evoked so personal a tone and so candid a voice that the book offended the few people who read it in the first edition. Only Ralph Waldo Emerson hailed Whitman “at the beginning of a great career.” Today Whitman is revered for his accomplishment, and many of his poems are admired as among America’s the exquisite personal meditation of Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking ; the celebration of the human body and spirit in Song of Myself ; the paeans to companionship of the Calamus poems; and the landmark elegy for Abraham Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d . Throughout Leaves of Grass we glimpse the sublime beauty of the natural world and feel Whitman’s loving embrace of the common man.