Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Published 1855 · 122,999 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Poetry

How hard is Leaves of Grass to read?

Leaves of Grass scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
Whitman draws from occupational jargon, geographic catalogs, and anatomical terms, mixing elevated diction with street-level American English. Accessible but wide-ranging.
Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
Long cataloging lines that pile clause upon clause in ecstatic accumulation. No traditional meter or rhyme, but the rhythmic free verse creates its own demanding cadence.
Abstraction: 68 out of 100
The self expands to contain everything: Manhattan ferries, prairie grass, battlefield wounds, the cosmos. Concrete images carry transcendental weight without surrendering their specificity.
Information density: 62 out of 100
The catalogs pack dozens of images per page: occupations, landscapes, body parts, cities. Dense with sensory detail but rhythmically digestible.
Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
Whitman addresses the reader directly, declares his intentions openly, and celebrates without irony. The poetry is assertive and unguarded rather than oblique.
Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
Grass as democracy, the body as soul, the open road as freedom, the wound dresser as national healer. Recurring symbols accumulate meaning across the collection's editions.
Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
Whitman is the least ironic major poet in English. He means every ecstatic declaration, every embrace of contradiction, every 'I celebrate myself and sing myself.'
Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
Individual poems reach climactic affirmations. The collection's open-endedness is expansive rather than withholding, inviting continuation rather than frustrating closure.
Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
The collection grew across six editions from 12 poems to nearly 400, with shifting arrangements and groupings. 'Song of Myself' alone spans 52 sections with no linear narrative.

How Leaves of Grass is regarded

Leaves of Grass holds a literary regard score of 91 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Leaves of Grass sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (266 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Leaves of Grass scores 33 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Romance
I know I am deathless,
Symbol: Anagogic
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Mythos: Romance iii (romance iii)
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Genre: Lyric + Epos
Camerado, this is no book,

Where the story of Leaves of Grass takes place

  • Whitman's America: Manhattan, Brooklyn and the continent, c. 1840-1892 (1840 to 1892), the main setting
  • Battle of Brooklyn, 27 August 1776, told by the Centenarian
  • Battle of Brooklyn, August 1776 (the Centenarian's story)
  • The Alamo massacre, Texas, 1836
  • The Civil War: camps, field hospitals and Lincoln's funeral cortege (1861 to 1865)
  • Civil War camps, hospitals and Washington, 1861-1865 (1861 to 1865)

5 things that are true of Leaves of Grass, with the passage for each

  1. Song of Myself states the poet's age as thirty-seven in its first section.

    I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

  2. The famous bathing scene counts twenty-eight young men on the shore.

    Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,

  3. Song of Myself contains the line about containing multitudes.

    (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

  4. Song of Myself ends with the poet sounding a 'barbaric yawp.'

    I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

  5. The Lincoln elegy 'O Captain! My Captain!' opens by declaring the voyage done.

    O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

Scenes in Leaves of Grass that Frye would name

53 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, passage 136
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake, The boy hears the bird and the sea whisper 'death' and learns his poetic vocation.
Lyric, passage 134
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, The mockingbird's song becomes a sustained lyric reminiscence.
Pathos, passage 158
Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, The battlefield vigil over a dead comrade is a ritual death scene.
Lyric, passage 169
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, The elegy is overheard utterance to star, bird and death.
Pathos, passage 173
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, The death of Lincoln is the book's central sacrificial pathos.
Anatomy, passage 29
The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp, The great catalogue of American occupations is an encyclopedic roll.

Books that share these scenes with Leaves of Grass

About the author

Walt Whitman