Whitman, as Printed
Leaves of Grass: the cover's gilt letters, sprouting roots and leaves

Brooklyn, 1855. The Boston Public Library’s copy; its gold lettering brightened to match the gilt rules on the same cover. Read the whole book

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Frontispiece · Title page

Whitman at thirty-five, engraved after Gabriel Harrison’s daguerreotype of July 1854, faces a title page that bears no name.

The frontispiece: Whitman standing in shirtsleeves, hat cocked, one hand on his hip, the other in his pocket The title page: Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn, New York: 1855.

Pages xii and 13

His preface ends in double columns. The first poem begins with no title of its own, under the book’s.

Page xii, the end of the preface, in two columns Page 13: Leaves of Grass. I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Pages 28 and 29

Neither the cover nor the title page names him. Sixteen pages into the poem, he names himself.

Page 28 of the first poem Page 29, with the line: Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,

Leaves of Grass, 1855, page 29

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His rooms

  1. Sky—Days and Nights—Happiness
  2. The Voice of the Rain
  3. This Compost
  4. Soon Shall the Winter’s Foil Be Here
  5. Spirit That Form’d This Scene
  6. Twilight
  7. What is the grass?
  8. Afoot and light-hearted
  9. The Poem of Earth

About himHis booksReadings

Sky—Days and Nights—Happiness A room of his: a poem with photographs