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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN num: 9780199539000
ISBN number: 0199539006
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 512
Printing Date: February 15, 2009
Publishing house: Oxford University Press, USA
Sale Popularity Level: 681563
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Whitman is yesterday regarded as America's Homer or Dante, and his work the touchstone for literary originality in the New World. In Leaves of Grass, he abandoned the rules of traditional poetry - breaking the standard metred line, discarding the obligatory rhyming scheme, and using the vernacular. Emily Dickinson condemned his sexual and physiological allusions as 'disgraceful', but Emerson saw the book as the 'most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed'. A century later it is his judgement of this autobiographical vision of the vigour of the American nation that has proved the more enduring. This is the most up-to-date edition for student use, with full critical apparatus.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Hemingway said all American writing comes from one book, Huck Finn. Wrong! He also believed himself a better writer than Fitzgerald. Wrong! I'm no literary expert, I haven't gone to Harvard or Yale or any of those overpriced universities for spoiled rich kids but in my expert opinion all American literature: rhythm, length, flow, syntax, form, etc., came from one book & this is it. Henry Miller was spot-on when he said America has only produced one great writer & that is Walt Whitman. Hemingway's style wasn't jacked from Stein or Anderson, well, maybe a bit from Anderson, so much as Whitman. Yeah, I know Bloom has drawn a connection between Hemingway & Whitman before, the repetition-ploy & all that, but what I'm telling you, if you'll forgive the trite cliché, there was poetry before Whitman & its wasn't the same after.
If you're short on time, forget Wordsworth or Keats or all those other `lazing the daisy breeze' 19th century knuckleheads, read this book & memorize some quotes (to impress people at office holiday parties).
Yes, I do believe this is the same book Clinton gave Lewinsky for her birthday. Wonder if there were any stains on it?
Rated by buyers -
4 1/2 stars, really, but we can't do that. This is the original 1855 version. Whitman added to the collection throughout his life, ending up with an overstuffed and very uneven "deathbed" version, which is better known. There are some good poems in it which aren't in the original, such as When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd, but there's a lot of pretty weak stuff, too. The 1855 has a small number of pretty consistently excellent poems which are highly original and loosely but definitely connected. Reading it is a very different experience from wading through the bloated, inconsistent final version - there's something Whitmanesque (i.e., at it's best) about the original collection as a unit. Malcolm Cowley's introduction is also a bit wild and wooly (written in the late 60s or early 70s), but interesting and enlightening.
Rated by buyers 
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At least as available for the Kindle, this is not the 1855 edition. It seems to be the final edition, which is of course great, but not what I intended to get based on the product description posted. Also, the foreward and afterward mentioned in the description are missing. I don't expect the moon for a low price, but I do expect to get what I pay for.
Rated by buyers -
Choosing the fullest, most complete version of Whitman's text, before the final editing of the deathbed edition, but following the additions made after the Civil War, the Norton Critical is a must have for students of poetry, or literature, and of nature. The wild, ecstatic hunger for the world, the ravishment of the senses, as Norman Mailer put it (though not about Whitman), the mysticism of the flesh, Whitman is, arguably, the most accomplished poet of American letters.
A must read for poets, students, and pagans (Whitman as spirit of the Green Man himself!).
Rated by buyers 
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I bought this and returned it. There must be someone out there with the right voice and reading skills to bring us Whitman's words and rhythms. Ms. Gibson's soprano sing-song doesn't make it.
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