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 abandoned the rules of traditional poetry--breaking the standard metred line, discarding the obligatory rhyming scheme, and using the emerging American vernacular with the formal precedents of the past while adopting the vernacular rhythms of his emergent American democracy. Most currently available texts reproduce the poetry from the ＂Deathbed＂ edition of Leaves, first published in 1892. Often obscured by the near-ubiquitous reprinting of this final edition, however, is the elaborate fluidity and daring of the various previous editions of Leaves. After the book’s initial publication in June 1855, Whitman revised and expanded the project a further seven times, with subsequent editions appearing in 1856, 1860, 1867, 1870-71, 1876, 1881-82, and at intervals until 1891-92. His revisions to particular poems were often substantial, and the addition of new poems to each successive edition so extensive, that the book’s 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, the present edition reprints the often more politically and sexually daring beginning, rather than the revised ＂end＂ of a particular poem’s journey. It thereby provides a portrait of a poet who feverishly attempted to reshape his project in tandem with some of the most tumultuous decades in American history, and who in the process radically revised 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.