1945 Walt Whitman : Leaves of Grass (First Pocket Borzoi Deathbed Edition) in Dust Jacket

Leaves of Grass

By Walt Whitman

Preface by Bernard Smith

Published by Alfred A knopf, New York, 1945. First Borzoi Edition and first Pocket Edition with the complete and definitive text from Whitman's "deathbed edition". Hardback book with its original unclipped dust jacket. 550 pages (last page not numbered). Jacket design by Ray Bethers.

CONDITION
A very good first Borzoi Edition. The dust jacket remains in very good condition with it's original price intact ($2.00 net). Boards and spine are very good. Endpapers good. All contents present and pages very clean throughout. No writing or names. Overall a very good copy of this edition. Scarce in original jacket.

FROM THE PREFACE
At the time this volume was being published, a pocket-size edition of Leaves of Grass did not exist. That such should have been the case is remarkable, to say the least, for Whitman's is one of those works that are actually lived with, and it should therefore be available in a format that encourages such familiarity. Because it is intended to be a reader's - rather than a student's - edition, it contains only Leaves of Grass. That statement, of course, needs some explanation.

The text that follows is an exact transcription of the tenth edition, completed in 1891 and published in 1892. It was the last edition supervised by Whitman himself, literally from his deathbed, and hence it is sometimes called the "Deathbed Edition." (He died on March 26th, 1892.) It represents Whitman's final judgment as to the form, wording, and sequence of his poems. Indeed, he wrote of it that "as there are now several editions of Leaves of Grass, different texts and dates, I wish to say that I prefer and recommend this present one" - and, accordingly, the best subsequent editions have followed it.

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass took various forms during the poet's lifetime. The 1855 first edition was a thin pamphlet of 12 poems; the great final edition encompassed more than 300. It is the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass--commonly called "the Deathbed Edition" that remains the bard's definitive version of what is indisputably an American classic.

In Leaves of Grass, Whitman abandoned traditional Victorian poetic forms and language, handled decidedly unconventional subjects and themes, and evoked so personal a tone and so candid a voice that the book offended the few people who read it in the first edition. Only Ralph Waldo Emerson hailed Whitman "at the beginning of a great career."

Today Whitman is revered for his accomplishment, and many of his poems are admired as among America's finest: the exquisite personal meditation of Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking; the celebration of the human body and spirit in Song of Myself; the paeans to companionship of the Calamus poems; and the landmark elegy for Abraham Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. Throughout Leaves of Grass we glimpse the sublime beauty of the natural world and feel Whitman's loving embrace of the common man.

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