Book: Leaves of Grass

Overview

Leaves of Grass (1855) introduces Walt Whitman’s expansive poetic project and the voice he would continue refining for decades. Self-published in Brooklyn, the slim first edition pairs a rousing prose preface on the role of the American poet with twelve untitled poems that reimagine what poetry can sound like, whom it can include, and what it can praise. At its center stands a long inaugural poem later called "Song of Myself", in which a capacious “I” merges with readers, workers, landscapes, and the teeming life of a young nation to announce a democratic, bodily, and spiritual poetics.

Contents

The 1855 volume does not yet hold the book-length architecture of later editions; instead it offers a concentrated burst of distinct but interrelated pieces. Alongside the great opening poem are works later titled "I Sing the Body Electric", "The Sleepers", "There Was a Child Went Forth", "A Song for Occupations", and "To Think of Time", among others. Each poem approaches a common set of concerns, identity, the sanctity of the body, the bonds among strangers, the circulation of matter and spirit, from different angles: dream vision, catalog, apostrophe, anecdote, or chant. The preface frames the book with a manifesto that exalts the ordinary and insists that the American poet must absorb the nation’s diversity without condescension.

Style and Voice

Whitman departs from inherited meters and stanza forms to create a rolling, oratorical free verse propelled by parallelism, anaphora, and long-breathed lines. His catalogs accrete detail until they feel like social panoramas; his direct addresses collapse the distance between writer and reader. Diction ranges from biblical and prophetic to colloquial and earthy, and the poems fold scientific curiosity, journalism, and street talk into a single register. The result is a poetry that sounds public and intimate at once, suited to the open road and the private ear.

Themes

Self and democracy fuse through the book’s most radical claim: that the singular person enlarges toward the collective without losing individuality. The poet declares kinship with farmers, mechanics, sailors, enslaved people, Indigenous nations, immigrants, sex workers, the sick and dying, and the exuberantly healthy, asserting a moral equality that is bodily as well as spiritual. Sexual candor, especially in celebrations of physical sensation, insists that the body is not an impediment to transcendence but its avenue. Nature appears as both companion and teacher, from grass blades to cosmic cycles, and death is recast as transformation rather than annihilation. Night meditations like "The Sleepers" enact radical empathy by traversing dreamscapes that level status and suffering. In "A Song for Occupations", labor itself becomes sacred, as the poet finds poetry in tools, trades, and exchange.

Historical Moment

Composed on the eve of the Civil War amid expansion, urban growth, and intensifying conflict over slavery, the book imagines a national literature equal to vast geography and moral crisis. The speaker’s mingling with all classes and conditions is both aesthetic gesture and social argument, proposing that a shared imaginative life underwrites political democracy.

Reception and Significance

Initial response ranged from scandal at its sensuality to exhilaration at its energy. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous private letter saluting the “beginning of a great career” helped bring attention, and Whitman unabashedly circulated the praise. Over successive editions he would expand and reorder Leaves of Grass, but the 1855 debut already contains the signature methods and commitments: an elastic free verse, a visionary American “I” that welcomes readers into communion, and a credo that honors the body, dignifies labor, and turns everyday life into epic material.