The cover of the ReadingRate edition of Leaves of Grass

ReadingRate edition

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman, 1855

521 pages · 130,047 words · about 9 hours · regard 91 of 100

Download the EPUB · Read it here · The book's page

Free to read and to download. Asking the Companion about a passage is part of Reader.

Walt Whitman self-published twelve poems in 1855 and spent the rest of his life expanding them into the most important collection in American poetry. 'Song of Myself' opens with a declaration that doubles as an invitation: 'I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume.' What follows is a fifty-two-section journey through every stratum of American life. Whitman rides the Brooklyn Ferry, watches a runaway slave, catalogs twenty-eight young men bathing, counts blades of grass, and declares the body electric. His long, surging lines reject meter and rhyme in favor of a rhythm borrowed from the King James Bible and the cadences of oratory. The cataloging technique piles image upon image until individual details dissolve into continental panorama. 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' collapses time itself, addressing readers a hundred years hence as intimates. 'The Wound-Dresser' records the Civil War hospital wards where Whitman tended dying soldiers, his ecstatic vision tempered by gangrene and amputation. The collection grew across six editions, absorbing the nation's crises into its expanding body. Whitman's great innovation was formal and philosophical at once: the free verse line enacts the democratic equality it celebrates, giving equal space to the president and the prostitute.

The text and its markup come from Standard Ebooks, which dedicated them to the public domain. Pages are fixed at 250 words, so a page number is the same on every screen and at every size.

More editions

All editions