Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done! The ship has weathered every wrack, the prize we sought is won. The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
The brigade of Virginia and Maryland have march'd forth to intercept the enemy, They are cut off, murderous artillery from the hills plays upon them, Rank after rank falls, while over them silently droops the flag, Baptized that day in many a young man's bloody wounds, In death, defeat, and sisters', mothers' tears. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Worthless Purchase.
This "book" -- and I use the term lightly because it is really little more than a photocopy with a slick cover stapled over it -- is not worth purchasing. It provides only the poems from Whitman's Drum-Taps which can be found in any collected edition of the poet's work; in other words, for the same price, you can have all of his poems, not just these. I purchased this book in the hopes it would be the original 1865 edition of these poems, but it's not -- just the revised versions (the poems changed dramatically over the years) rearranged in the original order. What a waste. ... Read more

Book Description
1897. Volume One of Three. Whitman is considered by many to be the greatest of all American poets. In his work, he celebrates the freedom and dignity of the individual and sings the praises of democracy and the brotherhood of man. Leaves of Grass is unconventional in both content and technique and is probably the most influential volume of poems in the history of American literature. Other volumes in this set are ISBN(s): 141917665X, 1419176668.Download Description
Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced." Published at the author's expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass inaugurated a new voice and style into American letters and gave expression to an optimistic, bombastic vision that took the nation as its subject. Unlike many other editions of Leaves of Grass, which reproduce various short, early versions, this Modern Library Paperback Classics "Death-bed" edition presents everything Whitman wrote in its final form, and includes newly commissioned notes.


From the Trade Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (65)

What book will you get when you order this?
There seems to be some confusion, both in the editorial reviews and the customer reviews, about what edition is being referred to in this listing.the first editorial review correctly discusses the first edition as shorter and "less bloated" than the deathbed edition.however, the rest of the reviews seem to discuss either edition indiscriminately.

the two are effectively different books.the cover shown is of the first edition including an illuminating essay by malcolm cowley--that's certainly the edition I prefer, and I hope thats what you would get if you ordered this.

Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman is one of the two most read poets by the American reading public.This is a classic and like Whitman, it covers every aspect of life, including his patriotism.

Walt Whitman is a Great Read!!!!!
If you love poetry, then this is a great read!!!

Don't Try to Read it at One Sitting
Whitman is not the world's greatest poet - that's probably Shakespeare - but he's certainly been the most influential American poetic voice over the past century. He was the first poet to take all of American life as his subject. Ever the Romantic, Whitman was also the first poet to bring Romanticism into line with everyday reality.

His narcissism can be annoying, but his panoramic descriptions of life and the imagination have a singularly cumulative power.Some of his short poems ("A Noiseless Patient Spider" and "To a Locomotive in Winter")are individually memorable. The longer poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," indirectly about the Lincoln assassination, is brilliant. I think most of his Civil War poems are overpraised, but "Come Up from the Fields, Father" is a masterpiece of its kind.

On the negative side, Whitman's transcendental philosophy, which he likes to indulge at length, will strike many readers as very sappy.His style, lots of details piled up on top of one another, grows monotonous, and readers who criticize his lack of traditional poetic craftsmanship cannot just be brushed off. My advice is to not to try to get through it all at once. The poems rarely become "difficult," they just tend to blur one into the other. Which may actually have been Whitman's intention.

Overall,there's never been a book quite like "Leaves of Grass," in any edition, and that's why it keeps selling as a true classic. In other words, a very old book that people still buy and read and enjoy even when no teacher is telling them to. Reading it will get you as close as one book can to actually living in nineteenth-century America, with all its follies, inequities, and promise.

Review of Walt Whitman's"Leaves of Grass"
This thick soft-backed "pocket" book has 490 pages.It could be called The Complete Whitman.It contains hundreds of poems.
I am a senior citizen who had not read any Whitman for more than 50 years and am enjoying it very much. His descriptions of the 19th century's people, places, and inventions are eye-openers.He was actually a feminist before there was such a concept, and also an abolitionist.He truly believed in equality and democracy.He was a nature lover and wanted to protect the environment.
Of course, there are parts I could quibble about, but that would be foolish.Whitman was a man ahead of his time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The Poetic Civil War
Whitman's book brings together his work from his journals and letters he wrote through out the entire war.As a nurse, Whitman tours hospitals and writes about the brutal realities of the war.His compassion for the wounded and sympathies radiates through out all of his work as he writes about various soldiers and his correspondence with them.With each chapter in the book we are treated to poems and scripture by Whitman that compliments his letters and journal entries.Whitman covers the entire war and it's easy to get a feel for his absolute care and love he had for the soldiers he tended to and visited.It's helpful for understanding just how horrible situations for many were and just what kind of man Whitman was. I highly recommend it.

A Great Reference for Whitman's Civil War Journals
Walt Whitman wrote many journals, letters and diaries during his years volunteering at the hospitals in Washington DC.There are many books out there which claim to combine all those elements into one book.This book does a great job keeping Whitman's actual writing--in other words, the entire passage is presented, including the date and location in which it was written.The major problem with this book is that the editor decided to break all of Whitman's work into Chapters with themes.There is a chapter about letter to his mother, about letters to soldiers, about observations of soldiers, etc.This means that the book is not chronological, meaning that in order to view all of Whitman's writing in the order he actually wrote it, you must jump all over this book.I am studying Whitman during the Civil War, and I use this book for most of my reference.But you should see how I have marked it, leaving notes all over the book to remind myself the order of the passages.There needs to be at least one book that has EVERYTHING in the order it was written.Despite this, this book is very good for anyone interested in getting a sense of what Whitman was doing during the Civil War.His language is easy to read and understand, and readers can skip to the chapters that interest them.I do recommend this book, but remember, the passages are not in order. ... Read more

Book Description
Walt Whitman looked to many different areas of American culture to develop a distinctively American poetry. This book investigates four of the areas he found most fertile for his own poetic development: the evolution of American dictionaries, the growth of the national sport of baseball, the decimation of American Indians, and the development of American photography. From each of these cultural activities, Whitman absorbed key aesthetic lessons that helped him compose his poetry. ... Read more

Book Description
Written for this volume by an international team of distinguished Whitman scholars, these essays address a wide range of contemporary issues in his life and art through varying approaches.The volume includes a chronology of Whitman's life and suggestions for further reading. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A wonderful example of American Poetry!
This book was amazing! If you like Walt Whitman this is the book to buy! A true classic. ... Read more

Book Description
When Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 it was a slim volume of twelve poems and he was a journalist and poet from Long Island, little-known but full of ambition and poetic fire. To give a new voice to the new nation shaken by civil war, he spent his entire life revising and adding to the work, but his initial act of bravado in answering Ralph Waldo Emerson's call for a national poet has made Whitman the quintessential American writer. This rich cross-section of his work includes poems from throughout Whitman's lifetime as published on his deathbed edition of 1891, short stories, his prefaces to the many editions of Leaves of Grass, and a variety of prose selections, including Democratic Vistas, Specimen Days, and Slang in America. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The great American poet
Whitman is the great American poet. Emily Dickinson has a greatness more metaphorically striking and acutely original in thought. And Wallace Stevens has a music which in its intellectual complexity perhaps transcends that of Whitman.
But Whitman is as Emerson rightly understood the essential American poet.
He is the voice of the new world, of a new land, of a new conception of mankind greater and more hopeful than any seen before. He is the cataloguer of continents and the master maker of the music of ordinary places and people.
He feels most deeply into the American story and is the great democrat of American poetry. His long lines have a freedom and a sense of expansiveness which embrace worlds and celebrate the sights and sounds of his native land. He more than anyone understood the poetry of American place-names. And he had a feeling for the natural motion of America's teeming new cities and long distant shores.
His 'Song of the Self' is a heroic American assertion of Mankind in its great exuberance of hopefulness. Yet no one more than him felt the pain of America's Civil War and its suffering, the lilacs that last in the dooryard bloomed.
There are certain parts of his great poem, set pieces such as 'When I heard the learned Astronomer ' or his lines on the observation of Animals that provide a kind of wake- up shock, a kind of revelation of Thought as Beauty.
He is the definitive American poet, whether we like every aspect of his barbaric yawp or not. Or whether we sometimes feel that his celebrations are misplaced and his self- singings mere aggrandizements.
The great continent, the great Westward expansion, the great thriving of a new world is as he pictured it a sequence of ever- expanding circles of a cosmos becoming greater and greater in time. And he gives that feeling, gives the sense that life has in it some mysterious greatness that moves us always to be more in the future than we can dream we are now.

Lovingly written, compiled and edited.
This wonderful edition features a judicious selection of Walt Whitman's poetry and essays, edited by distinguished literary critic Mark Van Doren (who is perhaps now as well known for being the father of Ralph Fiennes' character in 'Quiz Show' as he is for his erudition).

Van Doren's preface, itself a famous piece of work, accounts for both the best and worst of Whitman's creations (Van Doren seemed to share Randall Jarrell's view that we can only appreciate the best of Whitman's poetry by acknowledging the depths of his worst work), and seeks to locate the personal Whitman within his verses. This essay alone is arguably worth the price of purchase.

What really sets this anthology apart from others like it, though, is the manner in which Van Doren takes his argument - that Whitman's work was always intimate, even though its themes were variously epical or universal - and applies it to his selection of poems. In inevitable inclusions such as 'Song of Myself', 'Mannahatta' and 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry', we see Whitman the oracular poet, bringing into his egalitarian imagination the disparate bustle and brio of nineteenth-century New York and ordering them in verse. But when we read alongisde these poems 'Ashes of Soldiers', 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd', 'Native Moments' and 'Once I Pass'd through a Populous City', we begin to recognise the truth in Van Doren's thesis. Whitman's fear of death, his concern for the memories of the individual dead (as we see in 'As Toilsome I Wander'd Virginia's Woods'), and his nascently homerotic fascination with his own body (he writes in 'As Adam Early in the Morning', 'Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,/ Be not afraid of my body'), complement those aspects of his poetry for which he is perhaps most famous: his mythical imagination, exclamatory verse, and descriptive catalogues of local people and places, which remind me of Homeric battle lists, except that they are predicated upon peace, not war.

Combined with his eloquent prose accounts of his activities as a nurse during the Civil War, his letters, and his thoughtful, incisive tributes to those he recognised as great poets (his critical work occasionally resembles the scrupulous excellence of Samuel Johnson), Whitman's poetry discloses subtle resonances that readers might otherwise be inclined to overlook, or forget. Long-time admirers of Whitman will be overjoyed by this classic edition of his work. Those who haven't yet experienced the joys of his language could do worse than look here for a comprehensive overview of his oeuvre.

Natural Poetry
Not having read the entire book yet, I am not eligible for evaluating it as a whole. However, the poems that I have read amaze me and they are thereason why I call Whitman my favourite poet.

First and foremost, Whitmanfollows Emerson's thread of thougth in his nature-loving poetry, butWhitman allows himself fewer limits: He not only writes in free verse, healso writes explicitly about his sexuality.

His power, though, lies inhis ability to take everyday things and use them in what we might callcatalogue rhetoric: In a way he is just making drafts without logics. Thisis his way of putting everyday America into a poem. And it works. We maywonder what his point is, but Whitman is about sensation, not logics, andthe feeling you experience when you read 'Song of Myself', his masterpiece,is truly unique. It is the same feeling you have when you see a beautfulforest or sunset. This is poetry at its best. ... Read more

Product Description
Walt Whitman's verse gave the poetry of America a distinctive national voice. It reflects the unique vitality of the new nation, the vastness of the land and the emergence of a sometimes troubled consciousness, communicated in language and idiom regarded by many at the time as shocking. Whitman's poems are organic and free flowing, fit into no previously defined genre and skilfully combine autobiographical, sociological and religious themes with lyrical sensuality. His verse is a fitting celebration of a new breed of American and includes Song of Myself, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, the celebratory Passage to India, and his fine elegy for the assassinated President Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Walt Whitman's Complete Works
Among the many American authors and poets, the name Walt Whitman stands out as a giant. He single-handedly transformed the world of American poetry with his one and only collection, Leaves of Grass. Leaves of Grass, however, is not one collection between two covers. Rather, it is a collection of collections. Poems like "When Lilacs in the Dooryard Bloom'd", "O Captain, My Captain", and "I Hear America Singing" have forever been imprinted in the American psyche as brilliant, original works of literature. This book not only features Leaves of Grass, but also discarded poems and unpublished poems that were not published in the book. This book is a definitive introduction to the works of one America's greatest literary giants. ... Read more