Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman.

Among the poems in the collection are "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and in later editions, Whitman's elegy to the President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it until his death.

This last version of Leaves of Grass was published in 1892 and is referred to as the "deathbed edition".

In January 1892, two months before Whitman's death, an announcement was published in the New York Herald: "Walt Whitman wishes respectfully to notify the public that the book Leaves of Grass, which he has been working on at great intervals and partially issued for the past thirty-five or forty years, is now completed, so to call it, and he would like this new 1892 edition to absolutely supersede all previous ones.

Faulty as it is, he decides it as by far his special and entire self-chosen poetic utterance."