Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass is a collection of poetry by American writer Walt Whitman (18191892). The collection was first printed on July 4, 1855 in Brooklyn at a Fulton Street printing shop. About 800 copies were printed. The book was 95 pages long and had 12 poems. Whitman paid for this first printing. The book did not sell well.

Whitman added material to Leaves of Grass and revised the book many times during his life. The most famous poems in the book are "Song of Myself", "I Sing the Body Electric", "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd". The collection praised the human body, the material world, nature, and the experience of the senses at a time when poetry focused on religious experience and the life of the spirit.

Related pages
 Calamus

 Reading list 
Callow, Philip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992. ISBN 0-929587-95-2
Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. ISBN 0-671-22542-1
Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0-520-22687-9.
Miller, James E., Jr. Walt Whitman. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1962.
Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. ISBN 0-679-76709-6

References

 Other websites 
 The Whitman Archive--contains all editions of Leaves of Grass published in Whitman's lifetime, including text and page images.
Leaves of Grass - The "Long Foreground" 
Leaves of Grass at Project Gutenberg
Poets.org guide to Leaves of Grass 
Audio Book — complete & unabridged, public domain, Librivox Audio Recording of Leaves of Grass (1891 edition)

Category:19th-century American poems
Category:Obscenity controversies
Category:1850s books
Category:1850s poems