In the Library
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman, 1855
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 8.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 385
- Length
- Length 120k words
£1.99
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I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
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About the book
A barbaric yawp sounds over the roofs of the world, and an American poetry born without metre or rhyme begins. Walt Whitman, age 36, set the type himself for the thin 1855 folio, sent a copy to Emerson, and spent the next thirty-seven years enlarging the book through nine editions. Song of Myself unspools across fifty-two sections, the Calamus poems open a register American verse had never carried, Drum-Taps records the Washington wards where he dressed the wounds of Union and Confederate boys alike. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd is the great American threnody: lilac and star and thrush braided over a murdered president. The book contains multitudes because the country did, and because he refused to choose among them.