Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
377 chapters·19h 16m listening
4.11from 119,334 ratingson Goodreads
"Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman is a poetry collection first published in 1855. Beginning with just twelve poems, Whitman continuously revised and expanded this work throughout his life, eventually creating a collection of over four hundred poems. He celebrates American democracy, nature, the human body, and sensual pleasure in verse that breaks traditional rules of rhyme and meter. The book's explicit content sparked controversy and condemnation, yet it ultimately became recognized as one of the central works of American poetry.
Contains spoilers for the entire book
- Themes
- Atmosphere
About the book
Walt Whitman published the first Leaves of Grass himself in 1855: twelve untitled poems, with no author’s name on the title page, only an engraving of the poet in shirtsleeves. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to greet him “at the beginning of a great career”, and Whitman spent the rest of his life revising and enlarging the book through edition after edition until 1892. At its centre is the poem that became “Song of Myself”, in which the speaker embraces the whole of America, its workers, cities, bodies and landscapes, in long unrhymed lines that break with the poetry of his day. Frank about the body and generous in its democratic sympathy, the book shocked many early readers and went on to shape modern poetry.
Characters
The poet — The speaker
“Walt Whitman, a kosmos”, who sings himself and, through himself, every person, trade and landscape of America.
The child — The questioner in “Song of Myself”
A child who brings the poet a handful of grass and asks what it is, a question the poem answers in many ways.
The twenty-eight young men — The bathers
Young men bathing by the shore, watched from behind a window by a lonely woman who imagines joining them.
The runaway slave — The poet’s guest
A fugitive whom the speaker takes into his house, washes, clothes and shelters until he can go north.
The mocking-bird and the boy — “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
A boy on the Long Island shore who listens to a bird mourning its lost mate, and finds his vocation as a poet.
Abraham Lincoln — The fallen captain
The president mourned in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! My Captain!”.
About the author
Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was an American poet, born in West Hills on Long Island, New York, and raised in Brooklyn. He left school at eleven and worked as an office boy, printer, schoolteacher, journalist and newspaper editor before publishing Leaves of Grass at his own expense in 1855. For the rest of his life he revised and expanded it. In 1862 he went to Virginia to find his brother George, who had been wounded in the Civil War, and then stayed on in Washington, where for years he visited and comforted wounded soldiers in the military hospitals while working as a government clerk. His war poems appeared as Drum-Taps, and his elegies for Abraham Lincoln include “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! My Captain!”. After a stroke in 1873 he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where he prepared the final edition of Leaves of Grass and died in 1892.