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Leaves of Grass: The "Death-Bed" Edition

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Leaves of Grass: The "Death-Bed" Edition
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Walt Whitman
Introduction by William Carlos Williams
SeriesModern Library Classics
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:800
Dimensions(mm): Height 202,Width 132
Category/GenrePoetry by individual poets
ISBN/Barcode 9780679783428
ClassificationsDewey:811.3
Audience
General

Publishing Details

Publisher Random House USA Inc
Imprint Modern Library Inc
Publication Date 28 November 2000
Publication Country United States

Description

This is a new paperback edition of the final "Deathbed" edition of Whitman magnum opus. It includes an introduction by John Ashberry.

Author Biography

Before the age of thirty-six there was no sign that Walt Whitman would become even a minor literary figure, let alone the major poetic voice of an emerging America. Born in 1819 on Long Island, he was the second son of a carpenter and contractor. His formal schooling ended at age eleven, when he was apprenticed to a printer in Brooklyn. He became a journeyman printer in 1835 and spent the next two decades as a printer, free-lance writer, and editor in New York. In 1855, at his own expense, he published the twelve long poems, without titles, that make up the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The book, with its unprecedented mixture of the mystical and the earthy, was received with puzzlement or silence, except by America's most distinguished writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whitman lost no time in preparing a second edition, adding "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and nineteen other new poems in 1856. With the third edition (1860), the book had tripled in size. Whitman would go on adding to it and revising it for the rest of his life. Whitman's poetry slowly achieved a wide readership in America and in England. He was praised by Swinburne and Tennyson, and visited by Oscar Wilde. He suffered a stroke in 1873 and spent the remainder of his life in Camden, New Jersey. His final edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1892, the year of his death.

Reviews

"Whitman's best poems have that permanent quality of being freshly painted, of not being dulled by the varnish of the years." --Malcolm Cowley