The Portable Walt Whitman

A thorough compilation of Walt Whitman's best poetry prose and short tales Walt Whitman was a little-known Long Island journalist and poet who self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855. It had only twelve poems and was a tiny volume. Whitman spent his entire life revising and expanding the work in order to give a new voice to the nation that had been shaken by the Civil War but his initial act of bravado in responding to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call for a national poet has cemented Whitman's status as the archetypal American author.