**Ralph Waldo Emerson issued a call for a great poet to capture and immortalize the unique American experience. In 1855, an answer came with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.*Today, this masterful collection remains not only a seminal event in American literature but also the incomparable achievement ...

**Ralph Waldo Emerson issued a call for a great poet to capture and immortalize the unique American experience. In 1855, an answer came with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.*Today, 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. 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."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.