Leaves of Grass: The Definitive 1892 Deathbed Edition with Walt Whitman's Complete Poems($25.99Value)

Description

"Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you." Whitman spent thirty-seven years writing one book. It began in 1855 as twelve untitled poems printed at his own expense, and he kept enlarging and rewriting it for the rest of his life. In the winter before he died he stopped, declared it finished, and asked that this arrangement supersede all the others. What he built keeps turning to face the reader. An Exquisite Cover Design - Antique gold on deep forest green, wound with climbing morning-glories and dandelions in flower and in seed - the plants Whitman set among the grass and called innocent and golden. Complete and Unabridged - Whitman's final arrangement, nearly four hundred poems, from "Song of Myself" to "So Long!" His elisions are kept as he set them - bloom'd, travel'd, pass'd - spelling and punctuation follow modern conventions. The Poems Many Editions Leave Out - Both annexes are here, "Sands at Seventy" and "Good-Bye My Fancy," with "Old Age Echoes" - thirteen late poems gathered after his death and dropped from many complete editions. The last he handed over ten days before he died. His own notes are numbered. A Thoughtfully Designed Interior - Clean, generous typesetting with comfortable margins, and a full contents listing so any poem can be found in seconds. An Editorial Afterword - The volume closes as Whitman closed it, with his own essay "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," followed by an original piece on how a book grows for thirty-seven years and why he kept refusing to finish it. A Reader's Discussion Guide - Ten questions for book clubs, classrooms, and solitary rereading. About the Author - A portrait of the clerk, printer, schoolmaster, and hospital volunteer who set out to write his country and wrote himself instead. A Giftable Keepsake Edition - Made to be given and kept, for the poetry reader, the student of American letters, or anyone stopped once by a single line. About This Edition: A print-on-demand hardcover with matte case-laminate binding. The cover is printed flat onto the board - the ornamentation is printed ink, not foil, embossing, or raised texture, and there is no dust jacket. Pages are cream; the binding is glued rather than thread-sewn, standard for print-on-demand hardcovers. Every copy is printed when you order it, so it arrives new and unhandled. The book announces itself. A cluster of inscriptions sets the terms - one self, one democratic mass, body and soul equal - then "Song of Myself" runs fifty-two sections without once settling into a single speaker. What follows cost him. "Children of Adam" and "Calamus" put desire and comradeship on the page plainly enough that he lost a government clerkship and watched a later edition driven out of Boston. Then the war arrives and the register changes. Whitman went to Virginia at the end of 1862 to find his wounded brother and stayed near the army and its hospitals for years. "Drum-Taps" is what came back - recruitment fever, a march in the dark, a field of the dead at daybreak, an old man in "The Wound-Dresser" going bed to bed with a bucket and a sponge. Lincoln's murder produced "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and the book never leaves that ground again. The last third reaches outward, then turns in - "Passage to India," "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Songs of Parting" moving toward the end. The annexes are the voice of a half-paralysed old man in a Camden row house still writing at the window. Then Whitman steps out from behind the poems, explains what he thought he had been doing since 1855, and admits he is not sure it worked. Thirty-seven years of a man revising himself in public, and calling the result a country. Bring home the book he spent his whole life finishing.