Walt Whitman

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Leaves of Grass

On the Beach at Night Alone

Song of Myself

Whitman Illuminated

The Complete Poems

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

Whitman Poems

Discover the Penguin books that shaped us

Grand but intimate, earthy but also dreamy

Whitman had a fluid personality that made him able to ''merge'' invisibly, and with great empathy, with the images of other people and events that lodged in his mind...unprecedented assembling of rhythm, sound, language and images

The great unrhymed, long-lined, self-celebratory sensation of the 1850s

Do I contradict myself? 
Very well then I contradict myself. 
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) 
 
Abundant, ecstatic, generous, courageous - this is the first American epic poem, a celebration of selfhood and a catalogue of nineteenth-century American life of all ages and races. Revolutionary in style and controversial in content when it was first published in 1855, Whitman's masterwork has since inspired generations with its intoxicating rhythms and images, and its inclusive, praiseful joy. 
 
THE ORIGINAL 1855 TEXT

'I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.' 
 
To mark 160 years since its first publication, a new edition of the great American poet's most famous work

Walt Whitman was born on 31 May 1819 in Long Island, New York. Without much formal education, he began work at an early age as an office boy, printer and school teacher. His first major collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, was self-published in 1855. During the American Civil War, Whitman volunteered as a nurse at military hospitals in Washington, and his experiences inspired his next collection, Drum-Taps, published in 1865, and Memoranda During the War (1875). Whitman was an ardent Democrat, and wrote several poems to Abraham Lincoln, including ‘O Captain! My Captain’. His poetry was seen by many as immoral, and was the cause of his dismissal from a post as clerk in the Department of the Interior, but he won praise from his contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and his work was enthusiastically received by poetic circles in England. Having survived a paralysing stroke in 1873, Whitman left Washington for Camden, New Jersey, where he continued to write up until his death on 26 March 1892.

Song of Myself

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Grand but intimate, earthy but also dreamy

Whitman had a fluid personality that made him able to ''merge'' invisibly, and with great empathy, with the images of other people and events that lodged in his mind...unprecedented assembling of rhythm, sound, language and images

The great unrhymed, long-lined, self-celebratory sensation of the 1850s

About Walt Whitman

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