First published in 1855 with Whitman’s own money, Leaves of Grass is a highly sensual collection of verses that became a monument to American poetry. The journalist, philosopher, clerk, and Civil War nurse spent the following four decades revising and expanding the work from twelve poems to a massive four-hundred-poem compilation.   This masterful collection remains not only a seminal event in American literature but also the incomparable achievement of one of America’s greatest poets - an exuberant, passionate man who loved his country and wrote of it as no other has ever done. The text presented here is that of the “Deathbed” or ninth edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1892. The content and grouping of poems is the version authorized by Whitman himself for the final and complete edition of his masterpiece. Walt Whitman was a singer, thinker, visionary, and citizen extraordinaire. Thoreau called Whitman ‘probably the greatest democrat that ever lived’ and Emerson judged Leaves of Grass as ‘the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.’