This Library of America edition is the biggest and best edition of Walt
Whitman's writings ever published. It includes all of his poetry and
what he considered his complete prose. It is also the only collection
that includes, in exactly the form in which it appeared in 1855, the
first edition of Leaves of Grass. This was the book, a commercial
failure, which prompted Emerson’s famous message to Whitman: “I greet
you at the beginning of a great career.” These twelve poems, including
what were later to be entitled “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body
Electric,” and a preface announcing the author’s poetic theories were
the first stage of a massive, lifelong work. Six editions and some
thirty-seven years later, Leaves of Grass became one of the central volumes in the history of world poetry.
Each edition involved revisions of earlier poems and the incorporation
of new ones. As it progressed, it was hailed by Emerson, Thoreau,
Rosetti and others, but was also, as with the sixth edition in 1881–82,
beset by charges of obscenity for such poems as “A Woman Waits for Me.”
Printed here is the final, great culminating edition of 1891–92, the
last supervised by Whitman himself just before his death.
Whitman’s prose is no less extraordinary. Specimen Days and Collect (1882)
includes reminiscences of nineteenth-century New York City that will
fascinate readers in the twenty-first, notes on the Civil War,
especially his service in Washington hospitals, and trenchant comments
on books and authors. Democratic Vistas (1871), in its attacks on the misuses of national wealth after the Civil War, is relevant to conditions in our own time, and November Boughs (1888)
brings together retrospective prefaces, opinions, and random
autobiographical bits that are in effect an extended epilogue on
Whitman’s life, works, and times.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an
independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve
our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently
in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of
America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative
editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn
bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper
that will last for centuries.
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