Library of America - 3: Poetry and Prose

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This <em>Library of America</em> edition is the most comprehensive volume of the work of Walt Whitman ever published. It includes all of his poetry and what he considered his complete prose. It is also the only collection that includes, in exactly the form in which it appeared in 1855, the first edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>. This was the book, a commercial failure, which prompted Emerson’s famous message to Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” These twelve poems, including what were later to be entitled “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” and a preface announcing the author’s poetic theories, were the first stage of a massive, lifelong work. Six editions and some thirty-seven years later, Leaves of Grass had become one of the central volumes in the history of world poetry.