Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
1860 · 470 pages
- Author
- Walt Whitman
- Edition
- Third edition (1860–61)
- Published
- Boston, Thayer and Eldridge, 1860
- Pages
- 470
- File
- DjVu, 10.3 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
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About the book
Leaves of Grass is the life’s work of Walt Whitman, the book of poems he kept rewriting and enlarging from its first, self-published appearance in 1855 until his death in 1892. Written in long, unrhymed lines that follow the rhythm of speech rather than metre, it celebrates the self, the body, democracy and the ordinary working people of America, and it changed the course of poetry in English.
The 1860 edition is the third and the first to come from a regular publisher, the Boston firm of Thayer and Eldridge. It is far larger than the two earlier editions and introduces the poem groups Whitman called “Chants Democratic”, “Enfans d’Adam” and “Calamus”, the last two dealing frankly with sexual love and with love between men. Here the long opening poem later known as “Song of Myself” is titled simply “Walt Whitman”, and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” appears as “A Word Out of the Sea”.
Many readers and critics regard this edition as one of the most personal and daring versions of the book, before the poet’s later revisions and the experience of the Civil War reshaped it.
Contents
Tap a chapter to open the book there.
About this edition
The third edition of Leaves of Grass, published in Boston by Thayer and Eldridge and dated on the decorated title page “Year 85 of The States (1860–61)”; the copyright notice is for 1860. An engraved portrait of Whitman faces the title page. The volume runs to 456 numbered pages, and the poems are numbered in verses throughout, as Whitman printed them in this edition. The scan has a text layer, and the transcription on Wikisource has been fully proofread.
How to read it
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Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.