Complete poetry and collected prose

by Walt Whitman

This is the most comprehensive volume of Walt Whitman (1819-1892) ever published. It includes all of his poetry and what he considered his complete prose. This is also the only collection that includes, in exactly the form in which it appeared in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass. This was the book, a commercial failure, that 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. Each edition involved revisions of earlier poems and the incorporation of new ones. In 1856, for example, he added such poems as "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Spontaneous Me"; in the third edition (1860) "Out of the Cr