Leaves of Grass | Walt Whitman | What book will you get when you order this?

Leaves of Grass | Walt Whitman | The original lean, bursting on the scene, Whitman

books:

Leaves of Grass

	Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman Book Jungle, 2007 - 520 pages average customer review:based on 69 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Noted American poet Walt Whitman has created a masterpiece. Whitman loves writing about material things and the human mind and body. Whitman shows a true love of nature and man's role in it. One of the best known poems in the work is "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"which is a beautiful poem written about the assassination of President Lincoln.

What book will you get when you order this?

There seems to be some confusion, both in the editorial reviews and the customer reviews, about what edition is being referred to in this listing. the first editorial review correctly discusses the first edition as shorter and "less bloated" than the deathbed edition. however, the rest of the reviews seem to discuss either edition indiscriminately.

the two are effectively different books. the cover shown is of the first edition including an illuminating essay by malcolm cowley--that's certainly the edition I prefer, and I hope thats what you would get if you ordered this.

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The original lean, bursting on the scene, Whitman

4 1/2 stars, really, but we can't do that. This is the original 1855 version. Whitman added to the collection throughout his life, ending up with an overstuffed and very uneven "deathbed" version, which is better known. There are some good poems in it which aren't in the original, such as When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd, but there's a lot of pretty weak stuff, too. The 1855 has a small number of pretty consistently excellent poems which are highly original and loosely but definitely connected. Reading it is a very different experience from wading through the bloated, inconsistent final version - there's something Whitmanesque (i.e., at it's best) about the original collection as a unit. Malcolm Cowley's introduction is also a bit wild and wooly (written in the late 60s or early 70s), but interesting and enlightening.

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Excellent edition of Whitman's Masterwork

Choosing the fullest, most complete version of Whitman's text, before the final editing of the deathbed edition, but following the additions made after the Civil War, the Norton Critical is a must have for students of poetry, or literature, and of nature. The wild, ecstatic hunger for the world, the ravishment of the senses, as Norman Mailer put it (though not about Whitman), the mysticism of the flesh, Whitman is, arguably, the most accomplished poet of American letters.

A must read for poets, students, and pagans (Whitman as spirit of the Green Man himself!).

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