Song of Myself, Walt Whitman (Illustrated)

This pocket edition of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself offers the perfect introduction to his audacious and transcendent work, capturing its timeless message in a thoughtfully abridged and beautifully illustrated edition. A poet of radical joy and infinite possibility, Whitman celebrates the self, the soul, and the interconnectedness of all things—beginning, as he says, with “a spear of summer grass.”

At a time in American history when most ostensibly American poets were still writing in a well-trodden and meticulously formal British mode, Whitman did the most American thing there is: he completely rewrote the rules and changed them forever.

He unleashed free verse—raw, wild, American as hell—and dragged poetry from London’s parlors to Brooklyn’s docks. They call him the “father of American poetry” for it, and he earned it in blood. Longfellow spun singsong sagas, Bryant preached nature’s piety, Lowell churned out metered critiques. Walt? He smashed rhyme like Pete Townshend trashing a guitar. 

That fire explodes in Song of Myself, the crown jewel from Leaves of Grass. It’s Walt unfiltered—part ode, part war cry, expansive and hopeful, gritty and grand. 

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