Publisher's Synopsis
When Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855, he rocked the literary world and forever changed the course of poetry. In subsequent editions, Whitman continued to revise and expand his poems--but none matched the raw power and immediacy of the first edition.This beautifully-designed volume presents the original edition Leaves of Grass in its entirety, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous letter to Whitman.