Research Catalog

Title

Complete poetry and collected prose / Walt Whitman ; [selected, with notes and chronology, by Justin Kaplan]

Author

Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892

Publication

New York, N.Y. : Literary Classics of the United States ; Distributed by Viking Press, c1982.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Kaplan, Justin
• Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892.

Description

1380 p.; 21 cm.

Summary

• In 1856, for example, he added such poems as "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Spontaneous Me"; in the third edition (1860) "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and two new sections, "Calamus" and "Children of Adam". In the fourth (1867) he incorporated the Civil War poems published a few years earlier as Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps, including the poems on the death of Lincoln, notably "When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloom'd." And so it went, a triumphant progress, hailed by Emerson, Thoreau, Rossetti and others, but also, as with the sixth edition in 1881-82, beset by charges of obscenity for such poems as "A Woman Waits for Me." Printed here is the final, the great culminating edition of 1891-92, the last supervised by Whitman himself just before his death. Whitman's prose is no less extraordinary.^
• Specimen Days and Collect (1882) includes reminiscences of nineteenth-century New York City that will fascinate readers in the twentieth, notes on the Civil War, especially his service in Washington hospitals, and trenchant comments on books and authors. Democratic Vistas (1871), in its attacks on the misuses of national wealth after the Civil War, is relevant to conditions in our own time, and November Boughs (1888) brings together retrospective prefaces, opinions, random autobiographical bits that are in effect an extended epilogue on Whitman's life, works, and times. Here it all is, the complete Whitman-elegiac, comic, furtive, outrageous-the most innovative and original of American authors.
• This is the most comprehensive volume of Walt Whitman (1819-1892) ever published. It includes all of his poetry and what he considered his complete prose. This is also the only collection that includes, in exactly the form in which it appeared in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass. This was the book, a commercial failure, that prompted Emerson's famous message to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career". These twelve poems, including what were later to be entitled "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric", and a preface announcing the author's poetic theories, were the first stage of a massive, lifelong work. Six editions and some thirty-seven years later Leaves of Grass had become one of the central volumes in the history of world poetry. Each edition involved revisions of earlier poems and the incorporation of new ones.^

Series Statement

Library of America ; [3]

Uniform Title

• Library of America [3].
• Works. 1982

Alternative Title

• Leaves of grass
• Poetry and prose
• Walt Whitman
• Whitman, poetry and prose
• Works. 1982

Subjects

• Poetry
• Fiction
• Poetry as Topic
• Literature
• American prose literature > 19th century
• American poetry > 19th century

Genre/Form

• Fiction
• Fiction.
• Poetry
• Poetry.

Note

• Includes indexes.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Leaves of grass (1855) -- Leaves of grass (1891-92) -- Complete prose works (1892) -- Supplementary prose.

ISBN

094045002X

LCCN

^^^81020768^//r832

OCLC

8034382

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library