Leaves of Grass: The Essential

Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass himself in 1855, twelve poems, no author name on the cover. He spent the rest of his life adding to it, until it held nearly four hundred poems and he was running out of time. These are the essential ones: the self, the body, democracy, the war, the elegy, the cosmos, the farewell. Song of Myself runs across three days on its own; the rest are one a day, twenty-three days in all.

Read one big book alongside other readers, a day at a time. Cohorts set off on the date above.