Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass, featuring beloved poems such as “Oh Captain! My Captain!” and “Song of Myself,” was met with both scathing criticism and glowing praise when it was originally published in 1855. Arguably the best historical commentator of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman continues to inspire readers today.

An illustrated collection of twenty-six poems and excerpts from longer poems by the renowned nineteenth-century poet.

Contained herein is a vast collection of Whitman's writing, including vignettes from his childhood, a series of powerful accounts of his work in hospitals during the Civil war, and a large amount of nature writing. Composed in 1881 primarily from sketches, notes, and essays written at various stages of the poet's life from the Civil War onwards, Specimen Days is the closest thing Whitman ever published to a traditional autobiography. A wonderful insight...

As he was turning forty, Walt Whitman wrote twelve poems in a small handmade book he entitled "Live Oak, With Moss." The poems were intensely private reflections on his attraction to and affection for other men. They were also Whitman's most adventurous explorations of the theme of same-sex love, composed decades before the word "homosexual" came into use. Whitman never published the cycle. Instead he cut them up, rearranged them, and hid them in...

Walt Whitman experienced the agonies of the Civil War firsthand as a volunteer in Washington's military hospitals. This superb selection of poems, letters, and prose from that era includes "O Captain! My Captain!" "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "Adieu to a Soldier," and many other moving works.