Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman printed the first Leaves of Grass himself in 1855: twelve poems, no author’s name on the title page, a portrait in an open shirt. He went on enlarging and rearranging the book for the rest of his life; the final “deathbed” edition of 1891–92, which he asked readers to prefer, contains nearly four hundred poems, “Song of Myself” among them.

This edition presents that final arrangement, complete, in the long unrhymed lines that changed what poetry in English could sound like.