A01=Walt Whitman
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Walt Whitman
automatic-update
B01=Peter Riley
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DCF
Category=DSBF
Category=DSC
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Pre-order
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Language_English
PA=Not yet available
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Forthcoming
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780192894441
- Weight: 392g
- Dimensions: 128 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 12 Sep 2024
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
'I spring from the pages into your arms'
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass stands as one of the most influential and innovative literary works of the last two hundred years. Widely credited as the originator of free verse in English, Whitman put forward a radical new language of the body, the nation, and same-sex love. After the book's initial publication in June 1855, Whitman revised and expanded the project a further seven times, with subsequent editions appearing at regular intervals until his death in 1892. His revisions to particular poems were often substantial, and the addition of new poems to each edition so extensive, that the books dimensions altered dramatically.
This edition introduces Whitmans ongoing labour of revision and renewal his successive responses to the shattering years that encompassed the American Civil War and its aftermath. Beginning with the first edition of 1855, it moves chronologically, selecting and including the most substantial poems and clusters as Whitman first included them. In most cases, this means reprinting the often more politically and sexually daring beginning, rather than the revised end, of a particular poem's journey. The present edition thereby provides a portrait of a poet who attempted to reshape his project in tandem with some of the most tumultuous decades in American history, and who in the process altered forever the parameters and possibilities of poetry itself.
ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Peter Riley is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Against Vocation: Whitman. Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger (2022), which won the Ideas Prize for non-fiction. He organised the International Walt Whitman Week in 2016 and has served as faculty for it twice.
