As he grew older, his insight faded, and with it the vivacity of his words. Whitman’s vision and his language were at their most powerful in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855. (The first edition measures eight inches by eleven, and its lines seem to go on for miles.) Still, I think Whitman would have been touched at the prospect of being carried around in the breast or hip pockets of young men and women, intimately, close to the flesh.Ī few words about the text presented here. It is a miracle of a poem.īut a pocket edition? To shrink this expansive, world-swallowing language even to the size of a normal book is a bit absurd. At each rereading I feel exhilarated, as if for the first time, by its freshness and breadth of vision, its bodiliness, its high spirits, its astonishing empathy, by the freedom and goofiness and dignity of its language, and, not least, by its spiritual insight. “Song of Myself” is by far the greatest poem ever written by an American.
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