Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection that grew across the poet's working life. The first edition, published in 1855, contained twelve poems, and later versions expanded and reorganized the book until it held more than four hundred. This continuing revision makes the collection a developing statement of Whitman's ideas about human life, American experience, and poetic form.

The poems celebrate the body and the material world without separating them from mind or spirit. Nature, sensual pleasure, individuality, democratic fellowship, and the place of each person within a larger whole recur throughout the collection. Influenced by transcendentalist thought, Whitman treats ordinary physical existence as worthy of direct poetic attention.

Conventional rhyme, meter, and line length give way to expansive free-verse rhythms. Song of Myself and I Sing the Body Electric appear among the major poems; Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking adds another distinct meditation. Later editions included the Abraham Lincoln elegy When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. Across its changing versions, the collection presents poetry as an open, inclusive form capable of holding body, landscape, memory, death, and national identity together.