Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Grasblätter
Für wen es gedacht ist
For readers who love big, open, talkative verse about people, cities and the body, and anyone drawn to poems about nature, identity, freedom and friendship.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
Leaves of Grass is the one book of poems that Walt Whitman kept writing for nearly forty years. It first appeared in Brooklyn in July 1855, a thin volume of twelve poems with no author's name on the title page. Whitman paid for it himself and helped set some of the type. He went on to reissue it again and again, adding poems and reshaping the order, until the last edition of 1891 and 1892, which he called finished.
The book was a bet on a new kind of poem for a new kind of country. Whitman was a printer, a newspaper editor and a wanderer through the streets of New York. He wanted verse that sounded like American speech, with long lines, lists of ordinary people and trades, and no neat rhyme. He also wanted a poet who stood among the crowd and not above it. The result sounds like a man talking to you across a street, or a ferry deck, or a battlefield hospital.
In the next fifteen minutes you will meet the shape of the whole book. You will hear what is in the first edition, how Song of Myself works, why the body and desire stand so openly in these poems, and how the Civil War changed the voice. You will also learn how to read the lines aloud. We begin with the poet and the odd history of this one growing book.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1One book that grew with its poetFree
- 2The 1855 book breaks every rule
- 3Song of Myself turns one voice into a crowd
- 4The body and the soul stand equal
- 5America sings, and every worker is in the choir
- 6Calamus and the poetry of comradeship
- 7Crossing, connection and the reach of the soul
- 8The Civil War and the poems for Lincoln
- 9How to read it aloud and why it lasts
Punkt 1 von 9
One book that grew with its poet
Walt Whitman was born in 1819 on Long Island and grew up in Brooklyn. He left school young and worked as a printer's helper, a teacher and then a journalist. He wrote for and edited newspapers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He walked the streets, rode the omnibuses and crossed the East River on ferries, and all of that went into his poems later.
Leaves of Grass was never a single fixed text. The first edition of 1855 held twelve poems and a long prose preface. A second edition followed in 1856 with more poems. A third in 1860 swelled the book, and later editions came in 1867, 1871, 1881 and 1891. Each time Whitman added new work, cut some, changed titles and moved poems into new groups.
Because of this, readers speak of different Leaves of Grass books. The 1855 version is raw and startling and has one great long poem at its heart. The later versions feel more like a life story told in clusters. Whitman himself said the book and the man were close to the same thing. He treated each edition as another stage in a single growing body of work.
The title is a clue to its spirit. Grass is common, grows everywhere and belongs to everyone. Leaves also meant the pages of a printed book, so the title plays on both senses. Whitman liked that double meaning, because he wanted a poem as plain and widespread as a field.
The last form of the book, often called the deathbed edition, came out when he was an old man in Camden, New Jersey. He died there in 1892. By then the book held hundreds of poems arranged in named groups, with the early poems of 1855 still standing near the front like the first rooms of a large house.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
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About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 128,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 8 h 35 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 12 other languages
Questions about Grasblätter
What is Leaves of Grass about?
It is a collection of poems about the self, the body, nature, democracy, friendship, war and death. Whitman speaks as a common man in plain, flowing lines and tries to make every reader feel part of one shared human life.
Why did Whitman keep revising Leaves of Grass?
Whitman treated the book as the record of his whole life. He added poems, cut others and rearranged groups across several editions, from 1855 to the final one of 1891 and 1892, so it grew as he did.
What is Song of Myself about?
It is the long central poem of the book. A speaker celebrates himself and then widens out to take in all people, from workers to the enslaved, as well as grass, nature, the body, the soul and death.
Is Leaves of Grass hard to read?
The language is plain. It helps to read aloud.
Why was Leaves of Grass controversial?
Many readers in the nineteenth century thought it was shapeless and too frank about the body and desire. Some editions faced attempts at censorship, and later poems on love between men have also drawn long debate.