Walt Whitman's defining collection in three editions — 1897, 1900, and the 1921 posthumous edition.
Walt Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 -- a slim book of free verse that broke almost every convention of the poetry being written in America at the time, celebrating the body, democracy, and ordinary working life in long, unrhymed lines that scandalized some readers and electrified others (Ralph Waldo Emerson called it 'the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed'). Whitman kept revising and expanding it for the rest of his life, publishing new editions roughly every few years until his death in 1892; the editions collected here trace that evolution, from the compact original to the sprawling 'deathbed edition' Whitman considered final.