Leaves of Grass

'I spring from the pages into your arms'

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass stands as one of the most influential and innovative literary works of the last two hundred years. Widely credited as the originator of free verse in English, Whitman put forward a radical new language of the body, the nation, and same-sex love. After the book's initial publication in June 1855, Whitman revised and expanded the project a further seven times, with subsequent editions appearing at regular intervals until his death in 1892. His revisions to particular poems were often substantial, and the addition of new poems to each edition so extensive, that the bookâs dimensions altered dramatically.

This edition introduces Whitman's ongoing labour of revision and renewal his successive responses to the shattering years that encompassed the American Civil War and its aftermath. Beginning with the first edition of 1855, it moves chronologically, selecting and including the most substantial poems and clusters as Whitman first included them. In most cases, this means reprinting the often more politically and sexually daring beginning, rather than the revised end, of a particular poem's journey. The present edition thereby provides a portrait of a poet who attempted to reshape his project in tandem with some of the most tumultuous decades in American history, and who in the process altered forever the parameters and possibilities of poetry itself.

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Walt Whitman

Peter Riley is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Against Vocation: Whitman. Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger (2022), which won the Ideas Prize for non-fiction. He organised the International Walt Whitman Week in 2016 and has served as faculty for it twice.