Leaves of Grass

Where I heard about it

• Dissident Teacher — on A Library to Build Great Americans, a 468-title curriculum from the Substack writer (December 2025), under Poetry in the Ages 13–99+ band (Lexile 1310).

About this edition

Whitman self-published the book in 1855 as twelve untitled poems and an unsigned preface, then spent the rest of his life rewriting and expanding it through six more editions to the 1891–92 printing. The edition the curator linked reproduces the 1855 text; much of what people quote comes from the later revisions. Ralph Waldo Emerson read the first edition and wrote to greet Whitman “at the beginning of a great career” — Whitman printed the private line on the spine of the next edition without asking.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; the adult “Ages 13-99+” band is the part Kyle carded.
• Walt Whitman — the author.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson — the acknowledged influence and the book’s first significant reader.
• Transcendentalism — the movement Whitman comes out of, and past.
• Self-Reliance — the Emersonian idea the poems set to music.
• Individualism and Democracy — the two commitments the book is trying to hold together: the single self that contains multitudes, and the mass it is part of.
• Poetry — the form Whitman broke open.
• Republic of Letters — the portfolio idea.