The Portable Walt Whitman by Walt Whitman

Penguin Classics publishes the first edition of 'Leaves of Grass' in paperback. His continual tinkering dulled and even deliberately obscured the fresh and vivid impulsive spontaneity which vibrates throughout the 1855 original.įortunately you can find the authentic 1855 poem. In the later editions, however, Whitman buried his original masterpiece under a pile of revisions. Your old college paperback gathering dust on your bookshelf is probably the 1891 or 'deathbed' edition, and that's the one you're still likely to find in most bookstores. But if you'd like to re-experience his astonishment, and reclaim your own, open the 'Leaves of Grass' to that first poem.

We live in this later age where irony and cynicism prevail over optimism and idealism. Whitman's exhilaration may sound peculiar today. and the women my sisters and lovers,Īnd that a kelson of the creation is love. Among his works are Drum-Taps (1865), Democratic Vistas and Passage to India (1871), and Specimen Days (1882).And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,Īnd that all the men ever born are also my brothers. Symonds, and Robert Stevenson contended that Americans did not fully appreciate him. Although not previously neglected, he was particularly in the public eye during these years, when such English writers as William Rossetti, Swinburne, L A. During his last nineteen years he lived in Camden, New Jersey. After the war he became a clerk in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior, from which he was shortly dismissed by the Secretary on the grounds that Leaves of Grass was an immoral book. The Civil War found him working as an unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers in army hospitals in Washington, D.C. In 1855 he published Leaves of Grass, which he continued to revise and republish over his lifetime. Although he had earlier affected the mien of a dandy, he now dressed as a 'rough', and became prominent among the bohemian element of New York. After a period in New Orleans, considered seminal in shaping his philosophy, he returned to Brooklyn. He served as a printer's devil, journeyman compositor, and itinerant schoolteacher, edited the Long Islander, and in 1846 became editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, a position from which he was discharged for political reasons. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island and educated in Brooklyn, New York.

The Portable Walt Whitman by Walt Whitman