Leaves of Grass

About the book

Whitman's collection moves between declarations of individual presence and an extraordinary desire to speak with, for, and among other people. Workers, travellers, lovers, wounded soldiers, landscapes, cities, and the sea enter lines whose accumulating rhythms often feel closer to speech or song than to regular metrical forms. The poems repeatedly connect bodily existence with spiritual possibility, while their confidence is complicated by grief, war, ageing, and death. This substantial later collection includes the Civil War poems and late-life sequences alongside other parts of Whitman's developing project. It can be read through individual poems or through the changing emphases of the whole. Its distinctive challenge is to imagine a self capacious enough to acknowledge other lives without losing the physical particularity of its own experience.

• Self and community
• Body and spirit
• Democracy

Why read it

For expansive verse whose long, accumulating lines turn attention to ordinary lives into a daring poetic ambition.

English poetry collection · includes later sequences