Therefore it comes as no surprise that these two ideas appear in Whitman’s Preface in various conceptual configurations, allowing him to explore multiple dimensions of the American experience. Exactly the same can be said about the nation. Poetry, so to speak, is both substance and metaphor, it confronts the tangible reality and exists in the imagination. Accordingly, the poet-or more precisely “the great poet”-inevitably becomes the spokesman for the nation and accepts this ennobling and empowering responsibility with enthusiasm. In other words, poetry constitutes the core of and, concomitantly, finds its own final sanction in the American sense of nationhood, as if poetry nourished the nation as well as received its own nourishment from the nation. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” (5). These two central concepts are figuratively combined in the opening part of the Preface where Whitman writes: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature.
This programmatic statement, expressing Whitman’s utmost self-confidence as well as his faith in compatriots, has a double focus: poetry and nation. This edition, based on the earliest published version of 1855, features Whitman's most famous poem 'Song of Myself', an American epic inspired by his personal experiences.Walt Whitman’s Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass is a text manifestly highlighting the bond between esthetics and politics. Whitman's innovative use of free verse and the quotidian achieved his aim of reaching out to the everyday American.
This encouraged what would become a lifelong project as Whitman expanded and rewrote the volume until his death in 1892. The volume received great praise from leading Transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1855 Walt Whitman published his first collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass. Designed by the acclaimed Coralie Bickford-Smith and beautifully set, these slim, A format volumes are the ultimate gift for poetry lovers. A collectible new Penguin Classics series: stunning, clothbound editions of ten favourite poets, which present each poet's most famous book of verse as it was originally published.
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