Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ... II. "LEAVES OF GRASS" "One's self I sing, a simple separate person." Whitman's experiences of life and of natural objects were to find expression in poetry of a new order. He was moved to undertake this formidable poetic work by his sense of the great materials which America could offer for a really American poetry, and by his contempt for the current work of his compatriots Thus incited to poetic self-expression, Whitman [writes Mr. Conway] wrote on a sheet of paper, in large letters, these words: MAKE THE WORK, and fixed it above his table, where he could always see it while writing. Thenceforth every cloud that flitted over him, every distant sail, every face and form encountered, wrote a line in his book.1 Leaves of Grass, indeed (I cannot too often reiterate), has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and other personal nature--an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, in America), freely, fully, and truly on record. I could not find any similar personal record in current literature that satisfied me. But it is not on Leaves of Grass distinctively as literature, or a specimen thereof, that f feel to dwell, or advance claims. No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or as aiming mainly toward art, or mtlieticism.2 1 Prefatory notice, by W. M. Rossetti, to Poems by Walt Whitman. 1 A Backward Glance, etc.; the italics of the last sentence are ours. This passage may be taken as explanatory of much that appears objectionable (in many ways) in Whitman's writings. Whitman named his book after the grass, "which makes a carpet over the earth, and which is a sign and a presence rather than a form."1 Of the matter...