Leaves of Grass

In his quest for a truly native idiom, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) incarnated the American geography and its people in a new and transcendent poetic form. His monumental work, Leaves of Grass, celebrates sexuality, gender equality, and the astonishing beauty of the everyday. For Whitman, "The true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science and to common lives, endowing them with glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to real things, and to real things only." This complete edition of Leaves of Grass, which includes "Sands at Seventy" (from November Boughs) and "Good-bye My Fancy," contains those poems that have become part of the great American literature, including "Song of Myself," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "O Captain, My Captain."