Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

The first item in our Poetry 1860 - 2010 catalogue, a good place to begin because it is a work that never ended, Whitman revising and adding to the original 12 poems for the rest of his life leaving a corpus of over 400 works. This is the first edition published by someone other than the poet himself, having been preceded by two self-published pamphlets of 12 poems, which here have been expanded to include more than 100, the largest single jump in the work’s life, and now including the seminal ‘Song of Myself’, one of the most enduring works of American poetry. Published by Thayer and Eldridge of Boston in 1860, which went bankrupt shortly afterwards. An excellent copy.