Description:
This very attractive edition of LEAVES OF GRASS, arguably the greatest work of poetry by an American author contains the complete poems following the arrangement of the edition of 1891-1892.
The illustrations were made by Lewis C. Daniel, a tall, rangy, black-haired artist and teacher at Cooper Union who looks something like the men Walt Whitman apostrophized. Artist Daniel warmed up on Walt by making 14 etchings for Song of the Open Road, lettering the text on copperplates for a limited edition, which sold for $150 a copy. His Leaves of Grass illustrations he painted in oil, and drew with a greasy lithographer's crayon,
This very attractive edition of LEAVES OF GRASS, arguably the greatest work of poetry by an American author contains the complete poems following the arrangement of the edition of 1891-1892.
The illustrations were made by Lewis C. Daniel, a tall, rangy, black-haired artist and teacher at Cooper Union who looks something like the men Walt Whitman apostrophized. Artist Daniel warmed up on Walt by making 14 etchings for Song of the Open Road, lettering the text on copperplates for a limited edition, which sold for $150 a copy. His Leaves of Grass illustrations he painted in oil, and drew with a greasy lithographer's crayon, on paper. Full of movement, their swirling designs bursting with life, Daniel's drawings would probably have pleased Walt Whitman. The bearded poet appeared in some of the pictures, striding along, flying through the air, loafing and inviting his soul.
This production of Whitman’s great work contains the final revisions of Whitman’s body of poems—he died shortly before the release of the first issue in 1892—and has been the format for most standard editions since. Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS portrayed America at the crossroads between an old world—soon to be cast off—and the new world of our future present. Always the champion of the common man, Whitman is both the poet and the prophet of democracy. The whole of LEAVES OF GRASS is imbued with the spirit of brotherhood and a pride in the democracy of the young American nation. In a sense, it is America’s second Declaration of Independence: that of 1776 was political, this of 1855 intellectual. The poems are saturated with a vehemence of pride and audacity of freedom necessary to loosen the mind of still-to-be-formed America from the folds, the superstitions, and all the long, tenacious, and stifling anti-democratic authorities of Asiatic and European past’. To the young nation, only just becoming aware of an individual literary identity distinct from its European origins, Whitman’s message and his outspoken confidence came at a decisive moment.
LEAVES OF GRASS was Whitman’s favorite child. From the time of its original publication until the year of his death, he continued revising and enlarging it. If his reputation has fluctuated over the years and his position among, if indeed not at the head of, the list of great American poets was not assured until some time after his death, there was never any doubt of the matter in his own mind. “I know I am deathless,” he wrote. “Whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.” Time has vindicated his conviction.
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Manufacturer: Doubleday - Doran
Release date: 19 January 1940
ISBN-10 : B003YIHHW4 |
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