Where to Start with Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman is the poet who invented American poetry. Before him, American verse was an imitation of English forms. After Leaves of Grass, it was something new: expansive, democratic, ecstatic, rooted in the body and the open road. Whitman wrote in long, rolling lines that owed nothing to rhyme or meter and everything to the rhythms of speech, the King James Bible, and the pulse of a young nation discovering itself. He celebrated everything: the self, the body, sex, death, grass, comrades, the open air. He is the most influential poet in the English language after Shakespeare, and reading him for the first time feels like hearing someone finally say what you always felt but could never articulate.
Start here
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman · 152 pages · 1855 · Easy
Themes: democracy, the body, nature, self, America
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” The opening line of Leaves of Grass is the beginning of modern American poetry. Whitman self-published this slim collection in 1855 and spent the rest of his life expanding it, but the original twelve poems, raw, ecstatic, and revolutionary, remain the purest expression of his vision.
Why Start Here
The 1855 first edition is the best place to start because it is Whitman at his most concentrated and most radical. The later editions grew to over 400 poems, but the first twelve, especially “Song of Myself,” contain the full force of his breakthrough. Whitman had no model for what he was doing. He invented free verse, made the body a fit subject for poetry, addressed the reader as an intimate friend, and announced that American democracy deserved a poetry as vast and inclusive as the country itself.
“Song of Myself” alone is worth the price: 52 sections that move between the cosmic and the microscopic, the spiritual and the physical, the individual and the collective, with an energy that makes most poetry before it feel buttoned up.
What to Expect
Twelve poems in long, unrhymed lines. The language is biblical in rhythm and colloquial in diction. “Song of Myself” is the centerpiece and can be read on its own. The 1855 edition is available as an inexpensive paperback and free on Project Gutenberg.