Leaves of Grass

In 1855, a Brooklyn journalist self-published a book of poems that did not rhyme, did not scan, and did not apologize. It celebrated the human body in anatomical detail. It declared the poet and the reader to be one. It contained multitudes. Walt Whitman spent the next thirty-seven years revising and expanding Leaves of Grass through six major editions. This Raven's Gate Classics edition presents the complete 1891-92 deathbed edition, the final text Whitman authorized: all thirty-five Books, from the cosmic exuberance of Song of Myself through the Civil War elegies of Drum-Taps and the Lincoln poems to the quiet farewells of Sands at Seventy and Good-Bye My Fancy. Every poem Whitman wanted preserved, in the order he chose, including the erotic Calamus and Children of Adam sequences that got the book banned in Boston. No academic posturing. Just the most revolutionary book in American poetry, complete and unaltered, with the context and care it deserves.