Leaves of Grass (150th Anniv Edition)

by Whitman, Walt; Bloom, Harold

• ISBN13: 9780143039273
• ISBN10: 014303927X
• Edition: Anniv.
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-06-28
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• More Book Details

Summary

The publication of Leaves of Grass in July 1855 was a landmark event in literary history. Ralph Waldo Emerson judged the book "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." Nothing like the volume had ever appeared before. Everything about it--the unusual jacket and title page, the exuberant preface, the twelve free-flowing, untitled poems embracing every realm of experience--was new. The 1855 edition broke new ground in its relaxed style, which prefigured free verse; in its sexual candor; in its images of racial bonding and democratic togetherness; and in the intensity of its affirmation of the sanctity of the physical world.

Author Biography

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island and educated in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a printer's devil, journeyman compositor, itinerant schoolteacher, editor, and unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers.

Harold Bloom was the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than twenty-five books included Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?; Hamlet; Genius; How to Read and Why; Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; The Western Canon; The Book of J; and The Anxiety of Influence. He was a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy’s Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.

Table of Contents

Introduction and Celebration	vii
Harold Bloom
Suggestions for Further Reading	xxxix
LEAVES OF GRASS
Facsimile Frontispiece	2	(1)
Facsimile Title Page	3	(2)
Whitman's Preface	5	(23)
Song of Myself1	28	(69)
A Song for Occupations	97	(12)
To Think of Time	109	(8)
The Sleepers	117	(12)
I Sing the Body Electric	129	(8)
Faces	137	(5)
Song of the Answerer	142	(4)
Europe: The 72d and 73d Years of These States	146	(2)
A Boston Ballad	148	(3)
There Was a Child Went Forth	151	(3)
Who Learns My Lesson Complete?	154	(2)
Great Are the Myths	156