Leaves of Grass
American verse landmark
Leaves of Grass is the major work of American poet Walt Whitman, first published in 1855 and revised throughout his lifetime.
The collection celebrates democracy, the body, and the self in expansive free verse that broke from traditional poetic forms.
Its opening poem, "Song of Myself," established Whitman as a founding voice of American literature.
- free versePoetry without fixed structure
- American poetryVerse from the States
- transcendentalismIntuition-based idealist philosophy
- yawpHarsh, strident cry
- democracyRule by the people
egalitarianism · body · cataloging · nature · self-referentiality · interconnectedness · individuality · parallelism · American Civil War · soul · Walt Whitman · Song of Myself · enjambment · multitudes · Romanticism · myself · repetition · abolitionism
- PoemsThe Raven, Ozymandias, Invictus, Paradise Lost, Beowulf
- poetrypoem, poems, poetry, verse, verses
- American ClassicsMoby-Dick, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Little Women
- American LiteratureThe Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Moby Dick
- RomanticismWilliam Blake, the sublime, J.M.W. Turner, Eugene Delacroix, emotionalism
- American PoetryWalt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes
Leaves of GrassParadise Lost
Epic of humanity's expulsion
The Rape of the Lock · sonnets · villanelles · Petrarchan sonnet · villanelle