Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman first printed this collection himself in 1855, just twelve poems long, and spent the rest of his life enlarging and rearranging it until it held more than four hundred. He threw out rhyme and regular meter for long, surging lines that sound like ordinary American speech lifted to the pitch of song. The poems praise the body and the soul in the same breath, catalog laborers and cities and blades of grass, and insist that the poet contains multitudes. “Song of Myself” anchors the book, but the wartime elegies for Lincoln and the frank celebration of the senses are just as central. Few works did more to invent a distinctly American poetry. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.